illy Duncan will not be buried
by the County," he finished curtly.

"I'm glad to hear that," said Lamb conciliatingly, and added: "Of course
you're not counting on that $90?"

"There must be some left."

"Oh, no--nothing. Arm amputations are a $100. We are really out
$10--more than that with his board and all, but"--his tone was
magnanimity itself--"let it go."

When the Deputy-sheriff went out on the works and raised $125 more among
Billy Duncan's friends, he handed it to Lutz, the hospital undertaker,
and said--

"The best you can do for the money, Lutz. I've got to go to the County
seat on a case and I can't be here myself. Billy was a personal friend
of mine, so treat him right."

"Sure; we can turn him out first-class for that money; a new suit of
clothes and a tony coffin. Any friend of yours I'll handle like he was
my own."

There was something slightly jocular in his tone, a flippancy which Dan
Treu felt and silently resented. He looked at Lutz in his shiny, black
diagonals, undersized, sallow, his meaningless brown eyes as dull as the
eyes of a dead fish, and he thought to himself as he walked away--

"That feller's in the right business, and, by gosh, he's thrown in with
the right bunch."

The grave-digger's mouth puckered in a whistle when Lutz went to his
home to notify him that his services were needed.

"What! Another!"

The undertaker grinned.

"I'm about used up from gittin' robbed of my rest," complained the
grave-digger. "This night-work ain't to my taste."

"It's no use kickin'; you know what Lamb says--that these daylight
buryin's makes talk amongst the neighbors."

"Should think it would," retorted the grave-digger, "with them typhoids
dyin' like flies."

"I thought of a joke, Lem."

"Undertakin' is a comical business; what is it?"

"When an undertaker's sick ought he to go to the doctor what gives him
the most work or the least?"

"You got me; I'll think it over and let you know."

In spite of his garrulous complaints the grave-digger was at work in a
new grave on the sagebrush flat a mile or more from town when the
undertaker and the liveryman drove up at midnight with all that remained
of Billy Duncan jolting in the box of a lumber wagon.

The coffin of unplaned lumber was unloaded at the grave and the
liveryman hastened away, for he himself had no liking for these
nocturnal drives, but neither was he the man to quarrel with his own
interests. If the Health Officer and