Two men were still at work with shovels and they had spread out their excavation so wide, in removing slabs of unbreakable rock, that the place might have been a single, double or even a triple grave.
The wind moaned as murky clouds began to spit snow, and then on the gulch-washed road which climbed steeply, a little procession was glimpsed in the distance.
The men fondled their guns, but the cortège was lost again to view behind a screen of cedars and until it turned finally on the level of the graveyard itself, its details remained invested with the suspense of expectancy.
At the fore, when it arrived, was Brother Fulkerson astride his old mare, and on a pillion behind him rode the "Widder Henderson," the whiteness of her thin face startlingly accentuated by the unrelieved lines of her black calico gown. Under her erstwhile vivid eyes lay dark rings of suffering, but she held her head rigid and gazed straight before her.
The cortège came without the proper hush of due solemnity, for the rough coffin that held Jerry Henderson's body was borne on a fodder sledge and the stolid team of oxen that drew it required constant and vociferous shouts and goading as they strained unwillingly against their yokes. After the sledge trailed a dozen neighbors, afoot and mounted; all plastered with mud—but the crowd caught its breath and broke into a low murmur. There was only one casket!
As the evangelist dismounted and lifted his daughter down, the men who were there as observers for Kinnard Towers sought places near enough to hear every syllable.
Yet when the elderly preacher began to speak, while his daughter stood with the dull apathy of one only half realizing, the faces of the crowd mirrored a sort of sullen disappointment. For them the burial of the man who was, after all, well-nigh a stranger, was secondary in interest. It was in every material respect touching their lives and deeper interests, Bear Cat's funeral they had come to attend. But on that topic the bearded shepherd meant to give them no satisfaction. So far he had made no mention of Bear Cat, and now he was concluding with the injunction: "Let us pray."
But as he bent his head, a woman standing near the foot of the grave raised a hand that trembled with all the violence of superstitious fear. From her thin lips broke a half-smothered shriek, not loud but eerie and disconcerting, and she shrilled in terrorized notes, "Air thet a specter I sees thar?"
Many eyes followed the pointed finger and again a dismayed chorus of inarticulate sound broke from the crowd. Just behind Blossom—herself ghostlike in her white rigidness—had materialized a figure that had not been there before. It was a gaunt figure whose face these people had seen before only bronzed and aggressive. Now the cheek-bones stood out in exaggerated prominence and the flesh was bloodlessly gray. Though Bear Cat Stacy was present in the flesh his sudden materialization there might well have startled a superstitious mind into the thought that he had come not only from a bed of illness but from one of death. Ignoring the sensation he had created, he spoke in a whisper to the minister, and Brother Fulkerson made a quiet announcement.
"Hit hain't no ghost, sister. Turner Stacy hes been sore sick an' nigh ter death, but hit's pleased ther Almighty ter spare him. Let us pray."