"Come," said Gud, shaking the weeping man by the shoulder. "If your child wasn't baptized it ought to be damned, but there is no use weeping about it."
"I never had a child," said the man, "but if I were going to have one, I would take no chances, for I would call the priest before I sent for the doctor."
"Then why are you weeping?" repeated Gud.
"Not over the contents of this grave, I assure you, but because of the contents of that grave there by the creek's edge."
"Is a relative of yours buried there?" asked Gud.
"He was no relative of mine," said the man. "And yet I am weeping because he is dead, and you would weep, too, if you were in my boots. You see, I am the hangman and I hanged that man only a fortnight ago."
"Ah, ha!" said Gud, "you hanged an innocent man!"
"Indeed I did not! And if I wept over every innocent man I have hanged, I would never have time to clean the scaffold. But I hanged that man for a petty crime that was never committed."
"And you weep?" asked Gud.
"I weep," said the hangman, "because since I hanged him, we have discovered that he was guilty of a great crime for which I hanged another man a year ago."