“I’m sorry that we had to turn Mattie out.”
The message in the book I did not mention.
“Some one would have bought it,” the judge declared, speaking officially, and then he added, as his own thought, “She was done with life, anyway, long ago.”
The cemetery lay on one side of a low hill, behind the roof-tops of the town. The gravestones were small, and sheep nibbled the grass between them, so that as we approached it looked like nothing more than a pasture sprinkled with boulders.
A late, traveling circus had pitched its tents at the foot of the slope, and we were silent as we threaded our way through the rough-looking professionals who were standing around in the sun, trying to dry out after last night’s storm. Men were shaving, their pocket-mirrors hung upon a tree; women were combing their hair or sitting smoking, half-dressed, in the open. A charred fire showed where their breakfast had been cooked, and the open flap of a tent exposed their sleeping-quarters, with some of the ill-favored crew still under the blankets.
The elephant, as large as a monument, had been led down to the brook.
“We’ll have to hurry or we won’t get back in time for the parade,” the judge said. “I hear they are going to have a parade.”
He was as pleased as a child, and stopped and patted the elephant.
I could hear the caravan’s laughter behind us when we reached the old Hawes tomb. From the edge of the graveyard the circus band was tuning up. Grief was taking a holiday.
The judge unlocked the gate of the iron fence around the vault, and then he unlocked the grating and we went down two steps into the damp interior. The sunlight from the open door behind us flooded the cellar-like aperture, making its contents crudely visible. The stone walls gave out no hint of horror. Only an aroma of melancholy filled the resting-place of this strange family who had once been a dynamic force in their corner of the world and were now become a row of rusty boxes.