Foreheads were knotted; triad mutterings ran among them; but some one remembered a prayer book in one of the rooms in Drybone, and the notion was hailed.  Four mounted, and raced to bring it.  They went down the hill in a flowing knot, shirts ballooning and elbows flapping, and so returned.  But the book was beyond them.  “Take it, you; you take it,” each one said.  False beginnings were made, big thumbs pushed the pages back and forth, until impatience conquered them.  They left the book and lowered the coffin, helped again by McLean.  The weight sank slowly, decently, steadily, down between the banks.  The sound that it struck the bottom with was a slight sound, the grating of the load upon the solid sand; and a little sand strewed from the edge and fell on the box at the same moment.  The rattle came up from below, compact and brief, a single jar, quietly smiting through the crowd, smiting it to silence.  One removed his hat, and then another, and then all.  They stood eying each his neighbor, and shifting their eyes, looked away at the great valley.  Then they filled in the grave, brought a head-board from a grave near by, and wrote the name and date upon it by scratching with a stone.

“She was sure one of us,” said Chalkeye.  “Let’s give her the Lament.”

And they followed his lead: 

   “Once in the saddle, I used to go dashing,
    Once in the saddle, I used to go gay;
    First took to drinking, and then to card-playing;
    Got shot in the body, and now here I lay.

   “Beat the drum slowly, Play the fife lowly,
    Sound the dead march as you bear me along. 
    Take me to Boot-hill, and throw the sod over me—­
    I’m but a poor cow-boy, I know I done wrong.”

When the song was ended, they left the graveyard quietly and went down the hill.  The morning was growing warm.  Their work waited them across many sunny miles of range and plain.  Soon their voices and themselves had emptied away into the splendid vastness and silence, and they were gone—­ ready with all their might to live or to die, to be animals or heroes, as the hours might bring them opportunity.  In Drybone’s deserted quadrangle the sun shone down upon Lusk still sleeping, and the wind shook the aces and kings in the grass.

PART IV

Over at Separ, Jessamine Buckner had no more stockings of Billy’s to mend, and much time for thinking and a change of mind.  The day after that strange visit, when she had been told that she had hurt a good man’s heart without reason, she took up her work; and while her hands despatched it her thoughts already accused her.  Could she have seen that visitor now, she would have thanked her.  She looked at the photograph on her table.  “Why did he go away so quickly?” she sighed.  But when young Billy returned to his questions she was buoyant again, and more than a match for him.  He reached the forbidden twelfth time of asking why Lin McLean did not come back and marry her.  Nor did she punish him as she had threatened.  She looked at him confidentially, and he drew near, full of hope.