e tacked an
enormous sign upon the willow under one of Hughie's lanterns. Owing to
illness, it said, the ferry had been discontinued. Afterward he went
to tell Joan what he had done, and met the doctor on the stairway.

"By morning," he nodded slowly, answering Kenny's look. "Yes, I'm
afraid he'll be gone. I'd like to stay, Mr. O'Neill, for Joan's sake.
But there's a baby coming over at the Jensen farm. There always is.
And my duty as I see it is more with life than with death."

"I'll stay with him," said Kenny. "Joan must rest."

But she would not.

"Donald should be here too," she said. "We are all he has."

"Then," said Kenny, his lips white, "I shall stay here with you."

The night closed in with gusty showers of rain. There was no sound
from the high old-fashioned bed where Adam Craig lay, gray and still.
The silence, the gloom of dark wood, the grotesque shadows from a lamp
burning dimly on the bureau and the loud licking of the clock drove
Kenny with a shudder to the window. Death to him who so passionately
loved life's gayety and its music was more a thing of horror than of
grief. He found no solace in the wind and rain of the autumn night.
They plunged him instead into a mood of morbid imagery. The weird
music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The
tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on
eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting
the music of death. The rain was tears.

Ochone! Ochone! The wind of sorrow rose and fell, rose and fell, with
unearthly cadence. Kenny thought of the horrible Dullahaun who roves
about the country with his head under his arm and a death-warning basin
of blood in his hand ready to dash in the face of the unlucky wight who
answers his knock.

He shuddered and choked. Then Joan slipped into the shelter of his
arm, terrified at the thought of death, cried and watched the rain with
him.

Adam Craig died at dawn with the rain he hated beating at the window.
And peace came wanly to his wrinkled face.

CHAPTER XXII

IN THE CABIN

They were hard days for Kenny, who hated gloom save when it was
picturesque and transient. And they were harder for the pity and
misgiving in his heart. He himself perhaps had hastened the old man's
death with a careless story. Why had it bothered him? Why had it
goaded his wasted legs to horrible effort?

Ordinarily Kenny knew he would have rese