'There's that fluffy sigh I told yu' about,' said the Virginian.
'He's talkin' to her! I tell yu' he's talkin' to her!' burst out McLean, suddenly, in such a voice that we stared as he pointed at the man in the tree. 'See him lean over! He's sayin', 'I have yu' beat after all.'' And McLean fell to whimpering.
Wiggin took the boy's arm kindly and walked him along the trail. He did not seem twenty yet. Life had not shown this side of itself to him so plainly before.
'Let's get out of here,' said the Virginian.
It seemed one more pitiful straw that the lonely bundle should be left in such a vault of doom, with no last touches of care from its fellow-beings, and no heap of kind earth to hide it. But whether the place is deadly or not, man dares not venture into it. So they took Hank from the tree that night, and early next morning they buried him near camp on the top of a little mound.
But the thought of Willomene lying in Pitchstone Canyon had kept sleep from me through that whole night, nor did I wish to attend Hank's burial. I rose very early, while the sunshine had still a long way to come down to us from the mountain-tops, and I walked back along the cut-off trail. I was moved to look once more upon that frightful place. And as I came to the edge of the timber, there was the Virginian. He did not expect any one. He had set up the crucifix as near the dead tree as it could be firmly planted.
'It belongs to her, anyway,' he explained.
Some lines of verse came into my memory, and with a change or two I wrote them as deep as I could with my pencil upon a small board that he smoothed for me.
'Call for the robin redbreast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with flowers and leaves do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call to this funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole To rear her hillocks that shall keep her warm.
'That kind o' quaint language reminds me of a play I seen onced in Saynt Paul,' said the Virginian. 'About young Prince Henry.'
I told him that another poet was the author.
'They are both good writers,' said the Virginian. And as he was finishing the monument that we had made, young Lin McLean joined us. He was a little ashamed of the feelings that he had shown yesterday, a little anxious to cover those feelings with brass.
'Well,' he said, taking an offish, man-of-the-world tone, 'all this fuss just because a woman believed in God.'
'You have put it down wrong,' said the Virginian; 'it's just because a man didn't.'
Padre Ignazio
At Santa Ysabel del Mar the season was at one of its moments when the air hangs quiet over land and sea. The old breezes had gone; the new ones were not yet risen. The flowers in the mission garden opened wide, for no wind came by day or night to shake the loose petals from their stems. Along the basking, silent, many-colored shore gathered and lingered the crisp odors of the mountains. The dust floated golden and motionless long after the rider was behind the hill, and the Pacific lay like a floor of sapphire, on which to walk beyond the setting sun into the East. One white sail shone there. Instead of an hour, it had been from dawn till afternoon in sight between the short headlands; and the padre had hoped that it might be his ship. But it had slowly passed. Now from an arch in his garden cloisters he was watching the last of it. Presently it was gone, and the great ocean lay empty. The padre put his glasses in his lap. For a short while he read in his breviary, but soon forgot it again. He looked at the flowers and sunny ridges, then at the huge blue triangle of sea which the opening of the hills let into sight. 'Paradise,' he murmured, 'need not hold more beauty and peace. But I think I would exchange all my remaining years of this for one sight again of Paris or Seville. May God forgive me such a thought!'
Across the unstirred fragrance of oleanders the bell for vespers began to ring. Its tones passed over the padre as he watched the sea in his garden. They reached his parishioners in their adobe dwellings near
