They nodded. There were no greetings to acknowledge the introduction. They waited, eyeing the youth with distrust.
Pierre eyed them in turn, and then he spoke directly to big Dick Wilbur.
"Here's the first: I want to bury a man in Morgantown and I need help to do it."
Black Gandil snarled: "You heard me, boys; blood to start with. Who's the man you want us to put out?"
"He's dead—my father."
They came up straight in their chairs like trained actors rising to a stage crisis. The snarl straightened on the lips of Black Morgan Gandil.
"He's lying in his house a few miles out of Morgantown. As he died he told me that he wanted to be buried in a corner plot in the Morgantown graveyard. He'd seen the place and counted it for his a good many years because he said the grass grew quicker there than any other place, after the snow went."
"A damned good reason," said Garry Patterson. As the idea stuck more deeply into his imagination he smashed his fist down on the table so that the crockery on it danced. "A damned good reason, say I!"
"Who's your father?" asked Dick Wilbur, who eyed Pierre more critically but with less enmity than the rest.
"Martin Ryder."