'What do you mean, Wharton? you can't dig a grave in this rock.'
'No, lad, I know that,' he replied, 'and I ain't goin' to try. But we've got to live here, maybe some days, and there's hardly room for us as are alive, even if dead men's society was as attractive as it ain't.'
Whilst he spoke the old man had approached the figure, which half lay, half sat, in the hollow, its limbs broken and its face torn away by birds of prey. Reverently the old man lifted his hat, saying to the thing at his feet:
'You'll forgive us, pard, but we're kinder cramped for room up here, and if so be as you're gone aloft a few thousand feet more or less between you and these bones of yourn won't make no odds.'
Snap looked at Dick in some horror, but the old man's manner was so reverent and yet so determined that he did not interfere.
Tearing a rug, which before his strength left him he must have got somehow or other from the car of the balloon, into fine strips, Dick spliced them together into a cord. Then he rolled the remains up in the long cloak in which they lay, wound his cord of strips round and round it, and then turned again to Snap:
'Snap, my lad, don't take on at what I'm doing,' he said; 'there ain't no place for the dead among the living, nor can be neither. You don't believe as these bones is him, do you? Very well, then, I want you to help me bury them down there,' and the foreman pointed out over the brink of the precipice.
The afternoon had passed now, and one or two stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky. Down below, the mists were rising thickly from the wet bottom-lands and from the bed of the stream, and were drifting through the gorges of the mountains and up and up, until, looking over from then: dizzy stand, Dick and Snap saw nothing but heaving billows of heavy white clouds. It wanted but very little fancy to imagine that those clouds were white waves breaking round the base of the cliff on which they stood.
'Take the other end of the pack, Snap,' commanded Wharton; 'now, boy, have you got a prayer handy?'
'No, Dick,' faltered Snap, 'I don't know what to say.'