for little remained of that fine figure of a man
and nothing at all of his great resolute spirit, only as they came
they thought they heard a whimpering cry like the sound of a thing
that was caged and unfree.

To and fro, to and fro in the winds swung the bones and the soul of
Tom, for the sins that he had sinned on the King's highway against
the laws of the King; and with shadows and a lantern through the
darkness, at the peril of their lives, came the three friends that
his soul had won before it swung in chains. Thus the seeds of Tom's
own soul that he had sown all his life had grown into a Gallows Tree
that bore in season iron chains in clusters; while the careless
seeds that he had strewn here and there, a kindly jest and a few
merry words, had grown into the triple friendship that would not
desert his bones.

Then the three set the ladder against the tree, and Puglioni went up
with his sword in his right hand, and at the top of it he reached up
and began to hack at the neck below the iron collar. Presently, the
bones and the old coat and the soul of Tom fell down with a rattle,
and a moment afterwards his head that had watched so long alone
swung clear from the swinging chain. These things Will and Joe
gathered up, and Puglioni came running down his ladder, and they
heaped upon its rungs the terrible remains of their friend, and
hastened away wet through with the rain, with the fear of phantoms
in their hearts and horror lying before them on the ladder. By two
o'clock they were down again in the valley out of the bitter wind,
but they went on past the open grave into the graveyard all among
the tombs, with their lantern and their ladder and the terrible
thing upon it, which kept their friendship still. Then these three,
that had robbed the Law of its due and proper victim, still sinned
on for what was still their friend, and levered out the marble slabs
from the sacred sepulchre of Paul, Archbishop of Alois and Vayence.
And from it they took the very bones of the Archbishop himself, and
carried them away to the eager grave that they had left, and put
them in and shovelled back the earth. But all that lay on the
ladder they placed, with a few tears, within the great white
sepulchre under the Cross of Christ, and put back the marble slabs.

Thence the soul of Tom, arising hallowed out of sacred ground, went
at dawn down the valley, and, lingering a little about his mother's
cottage and old haunts of chil