ashamed and a little
frightened, and, blowing out the candle, he crept under the covers.

The afternoon was bright with a rare sun and the world was quiet.
Christopher lay full-spread on the turf, listening idly to the
"clip-clip" of Nelson's shears as the old man trimmed the hedge.

"And was my father _very_ strong?" he asked with a drowsy pride.

"No, not so very." Nelson stopped clipping and was immediately lost in
the past.

"Only when he was _that_ way five strong men couldn't turn him. I'll
say that. No, if they had to get him with a shotgun that day, 'twas
nobody's fault nor sin. If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the sand
with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones
cornered where he caught them between cliff and water--Guy's own baby
amongst them--and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody
else did--why, I'm free and willing to say 'twas his bounden duty to
hold a true aim and pull a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though I
was, and man of his poor father before him--

"No, I can't make it right to lay blame on any man for it, no more than
I can on them, his brother officers, that broke Maynard's neck with
their tent-pegs the night after Gettysburg. No, no--"

It was evidently a time-worn theme, an argument, an _apologia_, accepted
after years of bitterness and self-searching. He went on with the remote
serenity of age, that has escaped the toils of passion, pursuing the
old, worn path of his mind, his eyes buried in vacancy.

"No, 'twas a mercy to the both of them, father and son, and a man must
see it so. 'Twould be better of course if they could have gone easier,
same as the _old_ Maynard went, thinking himself the Lord our God to
walk on water and calm the West Indy gale. That's better, better for all
hands round. But if it had to come so, in violence and fear, then nobody
need feel the sin of it on his soul--nobody excepting the old man
Bickers, him that told Daniel. For 'twas from that day he began to take
it on.

"I saw it myself. There was Daniel come home from other parts where his
mother had kept him, out of gossip's way, bright as you please and
knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains. And so I say the sin
lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it
out to Daniel, Daniel changed. 'Twas like he'd heard his doom, and went
to it. Bickers is dead a long time now, but may the Lord God lay eternal
damnation on his