A small crowd, neighboring children, servants, and negroes, had gathered about Ariel’s gate, and Mrs. Louden watched the working-men disperse this assembly, gather up their tools, and depart; then Mamie came out of the house, and, bowing sadly to three old men who were entering the gate as she left it, stepped into her carriage and drove away.  The new-comers, Colonel Flitcroft, Squire Buckalew, and Peter Bradbury, glanced at the doctor’s buggy, shook their heads at one another, and slowly went up to the porch, where Joe met them.  Mrs. Louden uttered a sharp exclamation, for the Colonel shook hands with her stepson.

Perhaps Flitcroft himself was surprised; he had offered his hand almost unconsciously, and the greeting was embarrassed and perfunctory; but his two companions, each in turn, gravely followed his lead, and Joe’s set face flushed a little.  It was the first time in many years that men of their kind in Canaan had offered him this salutation.

“He wouldn’t let me send for you,” he told them.  “He said he knew you’d be here soon without that.”  And he led the way to Eskew’s bedside.

Joe and the doctor had undressed the old man, and had put him into night-gear of Roger Tabor’s, taken from an antique chest; it was soft and yellow and much more like color than the face above it, for the white hair on the pillow was not whiter than that.  Yet there was a strange youthfulness in the eyes of Eskew; an eerie, inexplicable, luminous, live look; the thin cheeks seemed fuller than they had been for years; and though the heavier lines of age and sorrow could be seen, they appeared to have been half erased.  He lay not in sunshine, but in clear light; the windows were open, the curtains restrained, for he had asked them not to darken the room.

The doctor was whispering in a doctor’s way to Ariel at the end of the room opposite the bed, when the three old fellows came in.  None of them spoke immediately, and though all three cleared their throats with what they meant for casual cheerfulness, to indicate that the situation was not at all extraordinary or depressing, it was to be seen that the Colonel’s chin trembled under his mustache, and his comrades showed similar small and unwilling signs of emotion.

Eskew spoke first.  “Well, boys?” he said, and smiled.

That seemed to make it more difficult for the others; the three white heads bent silently over the fourth upon the pillow; and Ariel saw waveringly, for her eyes suddenly filled, that the Colonel laid his unsteady hand upon Eskew’s, which was outside the coverlet.

“It’s—­it’s not,” said the old soldier, gently—­ “it’s not on—­on both sides, is it, Eskew?”

Mr. Arp moved his hand slightly in answer.  “It ain’t paralysis,” he said.  “They call it `shock and exhaustion’; but it’s more than that.  It’s just my time.  I’ve heard the call.  We’ve all been slidin’ on thin ice this long time—­and it’s broke under me—­”