The sudden blow for a few days seemed to reunite dissevered
Rough-and-Ready. Both factions hastened to the bereaved Daddy with
condolements, and offers of aid and assistance. But the old man
received them sternly. A change had come over the weak and yielding
octogenarian. Those who expected to find him maudlin, helpless,
disconsolate, shrank from the cold, hard eyes and truculent voice that
bade them "begone," and "leave him with his dead." Even his own
friends failed to make him respond to their sympathy, and were fain to
content themselves with his cold intimation that both the wishes of his
dead wife and his own instincts were against any display, or the
reception of any favor from the camp that might tend to keep up the
divisions they had innocently created. The refusal of Daddy to accept
any service offered was so unlike him as to have but one dreadful
meaning! The sudden shock had turned his brain! Yet so impressed were
they with his resolution that they permitted him to perform the last
sad offices himself, and only a select few of his nearer neighbors
assisted him in carrying the plain deal coffin from his lonely cabin in
the woods to the still lonelier cemetery on the hill-top.

When the shallow grave was filled, he dismissed even these curtly, shut
himself up in his cabin, and for days remained unseen. It was evident
that he was no longer in his right mind.

His harmless aberration was accepted and treated with a degree of
intelligent delicacy hardly to be believed of so rough a community.
During his wife's sudden and severe illness, the safe containing the
funds intrusted to his care by the various benevolent associations was
broken into and robbed, and although the act was clearly attributable
to his carelessness and preoccupation, all allusion to the fact was
withheld from him in his severe affliction. When he appeared again
before the camp, and the circumstances were considerately explained to
him, with the remark that "the boys had made it all right," the vacant,
hopeless, unintelligent eye that he turned upon the speaker showed too
plainly that he had forgotten all about it. "Don't trouble the old
man," said Whisky Dick, with a burst of honest poetry. "Don't ye see
his memory's dead, and lying there in the coffin with Mammy?" Perhaps
the speaker was nearer right than he imagined.

Failing in religious consolation, they took various means of diverting
his mind with worldly amusements, and o