a
kit of tools and wearing on his face a harsh and discontented expression.
As this man was middle-aged and had no other protection from the rain
than a rubber cape for his shoulders, the cause of his discontent was
easy enough to imagine; though why he should come into this place with
tools was more than Mr. Ransom could understand.

[Illustration: "I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to
cut 'em out."]

"Hello, stranger." It was this man who spoke. "Interested in the Hazen
monument, eh? Well, I'll soon give you reason to be more interested yet.
Do you see this inscription--On June 7, 1885; Anitra, aged six, and the
rest of it? Well, I cut them letters there fifteen years ago. Now I'm to
cut 'em out. The orders has just come. The youngster didn't die it seems,
and I'm commanded to chip the fifteen-year-old lie out. What do you think
of that? A sweet job for a day like this. Mor'n likely it'll put me under
a stone myself. But folks won't listen to reason. It's been here fifteen
years and seventeen days and now it must come out, rain or shine, before
night-fall. 'Before the sun sets,' so the telegram ran. I'll be blessed
but I'll ask a handsome penny for this job."

Mr. Ransom, controlling himself with difficulty, pointed to the little
mound. "But the child seems to have been buried here," he said.

"Lord bless you, yes, a child was buried here, but we all knew years ago
that it mightn't be Hazen's. The schoolhouse burned and a dozen children
with it. One of the little bodies was given to Mr. Hazen for burial. He
believed it was his Anitra, but a good while after, a bit of the dress
she wore that day was found hanging to a bush where some gipsies had
been. There were lots of folks who remembered that them gipsies had
passed the schoolhouse a half hour before the fire, and they now say
found the little girl hiding behind the wood-pile, and carried her off.
No one ever knew; but her death was always thought doubtful by every one
but Mr. and Mrs. Hazen. They stuck to the old idee and believed her to be
buried under this mound where her name is."

"But one of the children was buried here," persisted Ransom. "You must
have known the number of those lost and would surely be able to tell if
one were missing, as must have been the case if the gipsies had carried
off Anitra before the fire."

"I don't know about that," objected the stone-cutter. "There was, in
those days, a little orphan girl, almost an idio