was a man like me to prepare? I'd done everything I'd a
mind to for years and years. Some good things--some bad--mostly bad.
How was I to repent? Just to say I was sorry for them. I wasn't that
particular sorry either--that was the worst of it. A deal of the old
life was dashed good fun, and I'd not say, if I had the chance, that I
wouldn't do just the same over again.

Sometimes I felt as if I ought to understand what the parson tried to
hammer into my head; but I couldn't do anything but make a jumble of
it. It came natural to me to do some things, and I did them. If I had
stopped dead and bucked at father's wanting me and Jim to help duff
those weaners, I really believe all might have come right. Jim said
afterwards he'd made up his mind to have another try at getting me to
join with George Storefield in that fencing job. After that we could
have gone into the outside station work with him--just the thing that
would have suited the pair of us; and what a grand finish we might have
made of it if we ran a waiting race; and where were we now?--Jim dead,
Aileen dead to the world, and me to be hanged on Thursday, poor mother
dead and broken-hearted before her time. We couldn't have done worse. We
might, we must have, done better.

I did repent in that sort of way of all we'd done since that first wrong
turn. It's the wrong turn-off that makes a man lose his way; but as for
the rest I had only a dull, heavy feeling that my time was come, and I
must make the best of it, and meet it like a man.

So the day came. The last day! What a queer feeling it was when I lay
down that night, that I should never want to sleep again, or try to do
it. That I had seen the sun set--leastways the day grow dark--for the
last time; the very last time.

Somehow I wasn't that much in fear of it as you might think; it was
strange like, but made one pull himself together a bit. Thousands and
millions of people had died in all sorts of ways and shapes since the
beginning of the world. Why shouldn't I be able to go through with it
like another?

I was a long time lying and thinking before I thought of sleeping. All
the small, teeny bits of a man's life, as well as the big, seemed to
come up before me as I lay there--the first things I could recollect
at Rocky Flat; then the pony; mother a youngish woman; father always
hard-looking, but so different from what he came to be afterwards.
Aileen a little girl, with her dark hair falling over her sho