Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which gradually died away.  As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours:  “Piney, can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply.  The Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney’s shoulder, spoke no more.  And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep.

The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them.  Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept.  The moon through the rifted clouds looked down upon what had been the camp.  But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above.

They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp.  And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned.  Even the Law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.

But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees, they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie knife.  It bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand: 

Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who struck A streak of bad luck on the 2nd of November, 1850, and handed in his checks on the 7th December, 1850.

And, pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

THE REVOLT OF “MOTHER”

BY

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

This is a story of character against a New England background.  Each character is worked out with the delicacy and minuteness of a cameo.  Each is intensely realistic, yet, as in the cameo, palely flushed with romance.  “Mother,” along with her originality of action and long-concealed ideals, has the saving quality of common-sense, which makes its powerful appeal to the daily realities of life.  Thus when “Father,” dazed by the unexpected revelation of the character and ideals of the woman he has misunderstood for forty years, stands uncertain whether to assert or to surrender his long-established supremacy, she decides him in her favor by a practical suggestion of acquiescence:  “You’d better take your coat off an’ get washed—­there’s the wash-basin—­an’ then we’ll have supper.”