upon his face, half hopeful,
half fearful, very piteous to see.

"Wullie, Wullie, to me!" he cried; only the accents, formerly so fiery,
were now weak as a dying man's.

A while he waited in vain.

"Are ye no comin', Wullie?" he asked at length in quavering tones.
"Ye've not used to leave me."

He walked away a pace, then turned again and whistled that shrill, sharp
call, only now it sounded like a broken echo of itself.

"Come to me, Wullie!" he implored, very pitifully. "'Tis the first time
iver I kent ye not come and me whistlin'. What ails ye, lad?"

He recrossed the bridge, walking blindly like a sobbing child; and yet
dry-eyed.

Over the dead body he stooped.

"What ails ye, Wullie?" he asked again. "Will you, too, leave me?"

Then Bessie, watching fearfully, saw him bend, sling the great body on
his back, and stagger away.

Limp and hideous, the carcase hung down from the little man's shoulders.
The huge head, with grim, wide eyes and lolling tongue, jolted and
swagged with the motion, seeming to grin a ghastly defiance at the world
it had left. And the last Bessie saw of them was that bloody, rolling
head, with the puny legs staggering beneath their load, as the two
passed out of the world's ken.

* * * * *

In the Devil's Bowl, next day, they found the pair: Adam M'Adam and his
Red Wull, face to face; dead, not divided; each, save for the other,
alone. The dog, his saturnine expression glazed and ghastly in the
fixedness of death, propped up against that humpbacked boulder beneath
which, a while before, the Black Killer had dreed his weird; and, close
by, his master lying on his back, his dim dead eyes staring up at the
heaven, one hand still clasping a crumpled photograph; the weary body
at rest at last, the mocking face--mocking no longer--alight with a
whole-souled, transfiguring happiness.

POSTSCRIPT

Adam M'Adam and his Red Wull lie buried together: one just within, the
other just without, the consecrated pale.

The only mourners at the funeral were David, James Moore, Maggie, and a
gray dog peering through the lych-gate.

During the service a carriage stopped at the churchyard, and a lady with
a stately figure and a gentle face stepped out and came across the grass
to pay a last tribute to the dead. And Lady Eleanour, as she joined
the little group about the grave, seemed to notice a more than usual
solemnity in the parson's voice as he intoned: