McAdams gasped.
“What d’yer mean? Dig him up again? You’re joking!”
Turner laughed uncomfortably. “Of course, if it had been lighter, we’d have seen that this was pay dirt. And naturally we’d have washed it out. Just because it was too dark to see——”
“But we buried him!” exclaimed Aleck McAdams. “This ain’t no placer dump. This is a grave. Grave of my old pal. What the devil are we? Body snatchers? Ghouls?”
“I’d hardly thought it of you!” Turner replied, reddening. “About as unsentimental a devil as I ever saw.”
“Yeah, you told me I ain’t got no sentiment. What have you got?”
Turner frowned and bit his lip.
“There’s a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The former—sentiment—is a mighty good thing to use on living people. I didn’t roar at him and jerk the covers over his shoulders as if he was a horse, but he’s dead now—clay. It’s the most puerile sentimentality to talk about the sacredness of a mere grave.”
“Oh, it is hey? Well, I admit I don’t know the difference between the sentiment and the ‘tality’ you stick on it. But I do know I was riz decent, and I know what the homefolks think about graves and graveyards. Why, man, look what you wrote yourself!”
With a stubby finger Aleck McAdams pointed closely to the verse of the epitaph. Painfully squinting, he read out the words: