.

"I'll come back an' set here when I've took off my shoes. You kin go on.
I'll come in a minute."

Lysander looked into her face an instant as he started.

"The seam o' yer stockin' 's got over the j'int, M'lissy," he said
kindly; "it's made you sick at yer stummick; y'r as white as taller."

VI.

Old Withrow entered his own house with dignity at last.

Strangely enough, when the spiritual and presumably the better part of
us is gone, the world stands in awe of what remains. If the bleared eyes
could have opened once more, and the dead man could have known that it
was for fear of him the children were gathered in a whispering,
awestricken group at the window, that respect for him caused the
lowering of voices and baring of heads on the part of the household and
curious neighbors, he would suddenly have found the world he had left a
stranger place than any world to come.

There was no great pretense of grief. Mother Withrow looked at the dead
face a while, supporting her elbow with one knotted hand, and grasping
her weather-beaten jaw with the other. Perhaps her silence would have
been the strangest feature of it all to him, if he could have known. If
the years hid any romance that had been theirs, and was now hers, the
old woman's face told no more of it than the flinty outside of a boulder
tells of the leaf traced within.

"He wuzn't no great shakes of a man," she said to Minerva, "but I don't
'low to have him stood up an' shot at by any o' Nate Forrester's crowd
without puttin' the law on the man that done it."

Lysander's attempt at concealment had melted away in the heat of the
excitement occasioned by the murder. The drying up of the spring had
been no secret in camp. The men who had carried Withrow's body to the
house had talked of it unrebuked. Mother Withrow had heard them with a
tightening of the muscles of her face and an increased angularity in her
tall figure, but she had proudly refrained from the faintest
manifestation of surprise. Nor had she asked any questions of Minerva
or Lysander. This unexpected reserve had been a great relief to the
latter, who found himself not only released from an unpleasant duty, but
saved from any reproaches for concealment.

The coroner had come up from Los Angeles, and there had been an inquest.
Sterling had not been present, having ridden to Los Angeles to give
himself up; but the men to whom he had told the story when he came to
the camp had testified, and