“That line don’t go within ten rods o’ the graveyard anywhere, Dannie,—not within ten rods. Come, let’s see!”
He started on at a rapid pace, and, without waiting to go in by the entrance, began hastily to climb over the stone wall that surrounded the burial-place. Reaching the centre of the plot, halfway between the monument and the road, he looked searchingly about him.
“Not a stake, Dannie!” he cried. “Not a stick nor a stone anywhere inside. Not one!”
He was as intensely delighted as though he had come suddenly upon a mine of hidden treasure. The reaction from his state of mental misery was too great to be concealed, even had he desired to hide it. All night his distressed fancy had conjured up visions of his burial-plot ripped and torn with plough and pick and spade, of his monument and headstone begrimed with the smoke and shrinking from the touch of the shrieking, thundering, plunging monster of the rail. All night, in sleepless torture, his embittered heart had burned with what he thought to be an insult to the living and an outrage on the dead. And now, to find his fancies and his fears suddenly dispelled was like waking from a dreadful dream. “But”—he turned sharply on the boy at his side:—
“You told me they ran through the graveyard! Why did you tell me that?”
“Well—they—they—I saw them in here, anyway. They must ’a’ changed it afterward. I can show you the place where the stake was set.”
Sure enough he could, and did. The hole left by it was still distinctly visible. And he pointed out also where the grass was bruised by the treading of feet and the dragging of the chain across it.
The old man was satisfied, but Dannie’s mind was in a tumult. He hardly knew which way to turn or what to say. He dreaded every question that might be asked him, lest the answer to it should involve him in some hopeless contradiction.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!”