“Nick, he was too white a man to leave for the coyotes. We must do something with him.”
“You’re sure right, Tommy. But what can we do? This sand ain’t deep enough to keep ’em from diggin’ him up, even if we bury him.”
Tom looked about him and considered the situation a moment. “We’ll have to rock him up in here, Nick, in Dick Winters’ mine.”
At one side of the wide, blasted out mouth of the deep crack in the mountain from which Dick Winters had taken his gold, and level with the bottom of the crevice, there was a long, oval hollow, half as wide as a man’s body. The solid rock had cracked out of it after some giant-powder blast. They laid the body of Bill Frank in this shallow crypt and began to pile rocks around it. Suddenly Tom stopped, looked at Nick inquiringly, hesitated and cleared his throat.
“Say, Nick,” he blurted out, “it ain’t a square deal to put a fellow away like this. Somebody ought to say something over him.”
“No, you bet it ain’t a square deal,” said Nick. “We wouldn’t like it if it was one of us. But what can we do? There ain’t no preacher here.”
“I was thinkin’, Nick,” Tom hesitated and blushed a deep crimson, “I was sure thinkin’ that maybe—well, I thought—that you-all could say something. You know you always can say something. You-all better say it, Nick.” And without waiting for denial or protest Tom took off his hat and bent his head. Nick flashed a surprised look at his companion, waiting in reverent attitude, hesitated an instant, and then doffed his hat, bent his head and began. And the good Lord who heard his prayer did not need to ask his pedigree, for the Irish intonation with which he rolled the words off his tongue in honey-like waves told his ancestry:
“Good Lord, sure and Ye’ll rest this poor man’s soul, for he was white clean through. Sure, and he was no coward, and no scrub, neither. But the other two—Ye’d better let them fry in their own fat till they’re cracklin’s. You bet, that is what they deserve, and we can prove it. Amen.”
They built a close wall of rock around Bill Frank’s resting place high enough to reach the over-hanging rock, and so heavy and secure that no prowling coyote could reach the body, or even dislodge a single stone. After it was all finished they decided that there ought to be something about the grave to show whose bones rested within it. Nick Ellhorn tore some blank paper from the bottom of a partly filled sheet which he found in his pocket and wrote the inscription: