“Now, don’t you worry about me,” he mumbled, and walked through the living room into the front hall. Those double doors, closed and morguish, were more than he could endure. There was no reason for keeping a corpse in the house. Some decent mechanics should take care of such tragedy, he thought: deft hands should lift a person from his bed as soon as he died, and bear him out into the world of wet earth and drenched leaves, and let him become a lush part of it all.

Another rig stopped at the gate. A single buggy drawn by a sorrel mare. A wiry, stooped creature in a flapping linen duster jumped over the wheel and limped up the walk, taking off his hat as he came. This was Finis Sketchley, a wizened kernel of a man, who was cabinet builder and coffin maker and layer-out of the dead. Seen through the weathered mosquito-bar which covered the outer door, he was something repulsive and even pitiful, though his knobby shoulders were sifted with sunlight.

He rapped upon the leaden-glass panel beside the door.

“Mr. Sketchley,” Dan said.

The old man was winking rapidly with one eye, a nervous impulse which had flickered all his life. “Howdy, Dan. I heard you was back from out west, sonny.” Bale opened the door and the little man scurried inside. His voice dropped into a stage whisper as he nodded toward the double doors. “I just wanted to see if he’s all right.” The S sounds sputtered like steam in the dim hall.

“Go ahead.” Dan went out on the lower gallery. He filled his pipe from a handful of damp tobacco which he had dumped into a coat pocket. There was a great crying and protesting of ungreased wheels, far up the Chambersburg road. He knew even before he looked that nothing ever changed in Gettysburg. Grandpa Germels was coming to town with his ancient red ox-cart, the inevitable white-haired grandchild beside him.

Dan leaned against a pillar of the porch, studying the lavender cat-faces of pansies lifting from mossy bricks of the front flower bed. The red cart wailed closer and closer; when he looked up, Grandpa Germels was pointing with his goad toward the Bale house; the child was staring. The pink-bearded man jerked his square head down, lifted a clumsy hand in salutation, and moved on, east. The little boy kept looking back.

Presently the double doors crunched together once more, and Mr. Sketchley emerged, moistening his lips with a pointed tongue, rubbing his spread fingers with a large handkerchief. “It’s all right,” he said. “In summer I don’t like to wait so long for the burying.” Still in that rusty whisper … there was a streamer of smoky black crape tied to the handle of the doorbell, and a breeze flung it across Sketchley’s face as he came out. He pushed the clinging stuff aside.