“I have no hope for you,” said Bale.

They stood there and looked at each other; laughed a bit, nervously.

“Sometime we’ll have to argue this out,” Elijah said. “Doc ought to be through with his prescribing by now. I’ll have to go down and see.”

“Remember me to your mother.”

“Thank you,” nodded Elijah. Dan closed the trunk, locked it, and led the way up the hall to his own room, with the bundle of smelly clothing on his arm. Hud picked up his hat and wiped imaginary dust from it. “I’ll be at the funeral, if Doc doesn’t need me to drive.”

“Funerals are heathenish spectacles,” Bale said. “Grandfather would never attend one. Now he is compelled to.” He went to the railing of the stairpit and looked over it as Hud went down. Adam Duffey came out of the parlor into the lower hall, his face very red from some restrained emotion. He had been viewing the corpse. He lifted his bandaged hand as he saw Dan’s head above him. “Take courage for the future, Dan, on this sad day,” he whispered, in husky ritual. “And we’re glad that you arrived in time to lay him away.” Then they went out at the front door, he and Elijah. Dan went back into his room and spread out the retrieved clothing upon his bed.

Chapter 4

4.

Mrs. Wurke gave him a late breakfast and not a very good one. There were interruptions. Old Mrs. Knouse came from next door, to peek and spy. She said she wanted to know whether there wasn’t something she could do. Julius Orcutt, the lawyer, came. He and Dan found Pentland Bale’s papers in a little leather portfolio, locked in the top drawer of the library cupboard. Orcutt carried them away, walking on tip-toes until he had reached the street, looking as if he possessed some grave secret which he should never tell anyone but Dan.

He had whispered about the weather, and about Vicksburg. Dan could remember Benjy Orcutt, vaguely, as a fat child with buck teeth and a drooling lower lip. Now Benjy was before Vicksburg. Mr. Orcutt displayed the ambrotype which he carried in his breast pocket in a folder stamped with the American flag. Benjy had his hair cut very short, and he was still fat, and he looked younger than eighteen.

At last Dan left the table, abandoning the fried eggs which were now cold and leathery. Mrs. Wurke stood in the kitchen door, wooden in the starchiness of a blue apron.

“You didn’t get no good cooking yet, Mr. Bale.”

“It’s all right. I had plenty … Something seems to be the matter with my appetite today.”

“For your dinner I would make gut pie-plant pie, like Mr. Bale always ask.”