"Oh yes; I'll come," Jim said, in a tone which concealed a desire to utter one more protest, but to himself he said:
"That ends him! He's jumped into a hole and pulled the hole in after him. A man can't marry a family like that at his age, and pull out of it. He may, but I doubt it. Well, as I remarked before, it's none o' my funeral so long as he's satisfied."
But he said it with a painful lump in his throat, and he could not bring himself to feel that Albert's course was right, and felt himself to be somehow culpable in the case.
A DIVISION IN THE COOLLY
A funeral is a depressing affair under the best circumstances, but a funeral in a lonely farm-house in March, the roads full of slush, the ragged gray clouds leaping the sullen hills like eagles, is tragic.
The teams arrived splashed with mud, the women blue with cold under their scanty cotton-quilt lap robes, their hats set awry by the wind. They scurried into the house, to sit and shiver in the best room, where all the chairs that could contrive to stand erect, and all of any sort that could be borrowed, were crammed in together to seat the women folks.
The men drove out to the barn, and having blanketed their teams with lap robes, picked their way through the slush of the yard over to the lee side of the haystack, where the pale sun occasionally shone.
They spoke of "diseased" Williams, as if Diseased were his Christian name. They whittled shingles or stalks of straw as they talked.