“She wes a' the wife he hed,” said Jamie, as he rejoined the procession, “an' they luved ane anither weel.”
The black thread wound itself along the whiteness of the Glen, the coffin first, with his lordship and Drumsheugh behind, and the others as they pleased, but in closer ranks than usual, because the snow on either side was deep, and because this was not as other funerals. They could see the women standing at the door of every house on the hillside, and weeping, for each family had some good reason in forty years to remember MacLure. When Bell Baxter saw Saunders alive, and the coffin of the doctor that saved him on her man's shoulder, she bowed her head on the dyke, and the bairns in the village made such a wail for him they loved that the men nearly disgraced themselves.
“A'm gled we're through that, at ony rate,” said Hillocks; “he wes awfu' taen up wi' the bairns, conseederin' he hed nane o' his ain.”
There was only one drift on the road between his cottage and the kirkyard, and it had been cut early that morning. Before daybreak Saunders had roused the lads in the bothy, and they had set to work by the light of lanterns with such good will that, when Drumsheugh came down to engineer a circuit for the funeral, there was a fair passage, with walls of snow twelve feet high on either side.
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“Man, Saunders,” he said, “this wes a kind thocht, and rael weel dune.”
But Saunders' only reply was this: “Mony a time he's hed tae gang round; he micht as weel hae an open road for his last traivel.”
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