And Oscar brushed his hat with his sleeve and looked away at the purple and gray ridges and their burden of stars.

“Yes, it must have been terrible,” said Claiborne.

“But now he can not be left to lie down there on the rocks, though he was so wicked and died like a beast.  I am a bad Catholic, but when I was a boy I used to serve mass, and it is not well for a man to lie in a wild place where the buzzards will find him.”

“But you can not bring a priest.  Great harm would be done if news of this affair were to get abroad.  You understand that what has passed here must never be known by the outside world.  My father and Baron von Marhof have counseled that, and you may be sure there are reasons why these things must be kept quiet, or they would seek the law’s aid at once.”

“Yes; I have been a soldier; but after this little war I shall bury the dead.  In an hour I shall be back to drive the buckboard to Lamar station.”

Claiborne looked at his watch.

“I will go with you,” he said.

They started through the wood toward the Port of Missing Men; and together they found rough niches in the side of the gap, down which they made their way toilsomely to the boulder-lined stream that laughed and tumbled foamily at the bottom of the defile.  They found the wreckage of the slender bridge, broken to fragments where the planking had struck the rocks.  It was very quiet in the mountain cleft, and the stars seemed withdrawn to newer and deeper arches of heaven as they sought in the debris for the Servian.  They kindled a fire of twigs to give light for their search, and soon found the great body lying quite at the edge of the torrent, with arms flung out as though to ward off a blow.  The face twisted with terror and the small evil eyes, glassed in death, were not good to see.

“He was a wicked man, and died in sin.  I will dig a grave for him by these bushes.”

When the work was quite done, Oscar took off his hat and knelt down by the side of the strange grave and bowed his head in silence for a moment.  Then he began to repeat words and phrases of prayers he had known as a peasant boy in a forest over seas, and his voice rose to a kind of chant.  Such petitions of the Litany of the Saints as he could recall he uttered, his voice rising mournfully among the rocks.

"From all evil; from all sin; from Thy wrath; from sudden and unprovided death, O Lord, deliver us!"

Then he was silent, though in the wavering flame of the fire Claiborne saw that his lips still muttered prayers for the Servian’s soul.  When again his words grew audible he was saying: 

”—­That Thou wouldst not deliver it into the hand of the enemy, nor forget it unto the end, out wouldst command it to be received by the Holy Angels, and conducted to paradise, its true country; that, as in Thee it hath hoped and believed, it may not suffer the pains of hell, but may take possession of eternal joys."