In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across them with spikes.  Most of what this litter held was covered by another blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk.  From beneath its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at such an angle as to hide everything beyond to those in front.  The tall young minister, stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes.  Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.

Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter—­a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys.  One of these in whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden’s workmen in the wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his employer’s house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the top and broken all his bones.  They would have cared for him at Madden’s house, but he had insisted upon being taken home.  His name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy’s father, and likewise Jim’s and Hughey’s and Martin’s.  After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had run to bring “Father Forbess,” on the chance that he might be in time to administer “extry munction.”

The way of the silent little procession led through back streets—­where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by—­and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town’s most bedraggled outskirts.

A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank.  There were whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the keen of death.  Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful.  When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband’s wet brow, and looked—­one could have sworn impassively—­into his staring eyes.  Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.