lifeless breast.

"God fergive me," he murmured with a strangled voice. "He didn't nuver
hev no mammy ter raise him up aright. I reckon I failed him when he
needed me most--but Bas Rowlett's accountable ter _me_!"

When the neighbour woman came the next morning to prepare breakfast she
fled screaming away from the gruesome sight that met her eyes: the sight
of a dead man lying on a sledge, and a hunchback, who seemed dead, too,
stretched unconscious across the body. It was so that men found them
later, and carried them in, and it would have been more merciful had
Hump Doane been as lifeless as he seemed instead of coming back to the
ordeal he must face.

* * * * *

Through a community stunned and appalled into breathlessness the news
ran like quicksilver, and the easy-pacing mule from Parish Thornton's
barn was lathered with sweat as the young man called upon it to
annihilate time and space over the broken ways between his house and
that of his stricken friend.

At Hump Doane's stile Thornton flung himself out of his saddle and
paused for no word with those neighbours who stood gathered about the
dooryard. He heard the whine of a saw and the pounding of a hammer off
somewhere to the rear, and knew that volunteer and amateur undertakers
were fashioning a coffin--but he hurled himself like a human hurricane
across the threshold and demanded briefly: "War's Hump at?"

The room was dim and murky at its corners, but through the two doors
poured a flood of morning light, and into its shaft projected an
unhinged shutter supported on two saw-horses, with a sheeted burden upon
it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's
centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of
the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too
numbed for full acuteness of feeling.

Other figures to the number of two or three moved as silently as dark
wraiths about the place, but when Parish entered they drifted out,
leaving him alone with his friend, and one of the doors closed upon
their going.

Then the lightnings of outraged wrath that seemed to crackle in the
young clansman's eyes stilled themselves and altered into something like
tenderness as he moved with catlike softness of footfall to where the
elder man sat, and let a hand fall on his malformed shoulder.

"Hump," he said, briefly, "my heart's plum sufferin' fer ye. I jest
heared of hi