She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill.  She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik.  Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter.  She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied.  A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window.

She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone.  There was no one.

The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions.  A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back.

“It is good to be wanted,” she thought.  “It will drug me.  But——­Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?”

CHAPTER XXXV

She tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms.  She fanatically cleaned house all April.  She knitted a sweater for Hugh.  She was diligent at Red Cross work.  She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies’ hands.

Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia.

In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie.  They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin’s Funeral March—­a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music.

Champ was broken.  His rheumatism was worse.  The rooms over the store were silent.  He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator.  Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins.  He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery.  Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for.

The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go.  The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions.

She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity.  But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership.