Beyond their voices the rim of the sun moved above the violet hills, and Drybone, amid the quiet, long, new fields of radiance, stood august and strange.

Down along the tall, bare slant from the graveyard the two horsemen were riding back.  They could be seen across the river, and the horse-racers grew curious.  As more and more watched, the crowd began to speak.  It was a calf the two were bringing.  It was too small for a calf.  It was dead.  It was a coyote they had roped.  See it swing!  See it fall on the road!

“It’s a coffin, boys!” said one, shrewd at guessing.

At that the event of last night drifted across their memories, and they wheeled and spurred their ponies.  Their crowding hoofs on the bridge brought the swimmers from the waters below and, dressing, they climbed quickly to the plain and followed the gathering.  By the door already were Jerky Bill and Limber Jim and the Doughie and always more, dashing up with their ponies; halting with a sharp scatter of gravel to hear and comment.  Barker was gone, but the important coroner told his news.  And it amazed each comer, and set him speaking and remembering past things with the others.  “Dead!” each one began.  “Her, does he say?”

“Why, pshaw!”

“Why, Frenchy said Doc had her cured!”

Jack Saunders claimed she had rode to Box Elder with Lin McLean.  “Dead?  Why, pshaw!”

“Seems Doc couldn’t swim her out.”

“Couldn’t swim her out?”

“That’s it.  Doc couldn’t swim her out.”

“Well—­there’s one less of us.”

“Sure!  She was one of the boys.”

“She grub-staked me when I went broke in ’84.”

“She gave me fifty dollars onced at Lander, to buy a saddle.”

“I run agin her when she was a biscuit-shooter.”

“Sidney, Nebraska.  I run again her there, too.”

“I knowed her at Laramie.”

“Where’s Lin?  He knowed her all the way from Bear Creek to Cheyenne.”

They laughed loudly at this.

“That’s a lonesome coffin,” said the Doughie.  “That the best you could do?”

“You’d say so!” said Toothpick Kid.

“Choices are getting scarce up there,” said Chalkeye.  “We looked the lot over.”

They were arriving from their search among the old dug-up graves on the hill.  Now they descended from their ponies, with the box roped and rattling between them.  “Where’s your hearse, Jerky?” asked Chalkeye.

“Have her round in a minute,” said the cowboy, and galloped away with three or four others.

“Turruble lonesome coffin, all the same,” repeated the Doughie.  And they surveyed the box that had once held some soldier.

“She did like fixin’s,” said Limber Jim.

“Fixin’s!” said Toothpick Kid.  “That’s easy.”