d to answer us. But as we stood speaking there, a giant
puff of breath rose up to us between the black walls.

"There's that fluffy sigh I told yu' about," said the Virginian.

"He's talkin' to her! I tell yu' he's talkin' to her!" burst out McLean,
suddenly, in such a voice that we stared as he pointed at the man in the
tree. "See him lean over! He's sayin', 'I have yu' beat after all.'" And
McLean fell to whimpering.

Wiggin took the boy's arm kindly and walked him along the trail. He did
not seem twenty yet. Life had not shown this side of itself to him so
plainly before.

"Let's get out of here," said the Virginian.

It seemed one more pitiful straw that the lonely bundle should be
left in such a vault of doom, with no last touches of care from its
fellow-beings, and no heap of kind earth to hide it. But whether the
place is deadly or not, man dares not venture into it. So they took Hank
from the tree that night, and early next morning they buried him near
camp on the top of a little mound.

But the thought of Willomene lying in Pitchstone Canyon had kept sleep
from me through that whole night, nor did I wish to attend Hank's
burial. I rose very early, while the sunshine had still a long way to
come down to us from the mountain-tops, and I walked back along the
cut-off trail. I was moved to look once more upon that frightful place.
And as I came to the edge of the timber, there was the Virginian. He did
not expect any one. He had set up the crucifix as near the dead tree as
it could be firmly planted.

"It belongs to her, anyway," he explained.

Some lines of verse came into my memory, and with a change or two I
wrote them as deep as I could with my pencil upon a small board that he
smoothed for me.

"Call for the robin redbreast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they
hover, And with flowers and leaves do cover The friendless bodies of
unburied men. Call to this funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse, and
the mole To rear her hillocks that shall keep her warm.

"That kind o' quaint language reminds me of a play I seen onced in Saynt
Paul," said the Virginian. "About young Prince Henry."

I told him that another poet was the author.

"They are both good writers," said the Virginian. And as he was
finishing the monument that we had made, young Lin McLean joined us.
He was a little ashamed of the feelings that he had shown yesterday, a
little anxious to cover those feelings with brass.

"Well," he sa