It was a terrible scene when Jeff reached the cabin. He saw Ola May first, bleeding from her head and arms, her clothes torn and tracked with smears of dirt. She waved him off. Hers were superficial wounds, scrapes and cuts from sliding across the ground after she had been thrown from the wagon.

Granny seemed to look better. Her clothes were bloodstained, but Ola May had bound up the wound in her head with some linen, and she lay still, sleeping. Her breathing was shallow, and she groaned in her sleep, reacting to the pain of her hip.

They sat with her for three hours, waiting for a doctor to come, knowing that it was too early for a doctor to cover all the distance he would have to get to the cabin. And it was unlikely that Gardenhire had done much more than reach Klondyke and a telephone by this time.

As it grew dark, Granny Jane's breathing became more shallow and ragged, becoming the full death rattle shortly after dark. She died without regaining consciousness. The doctor arrived in the morning and did a quick examination—concussion likely, skull fracture possibly, and broken hip certainly.

Jeff took Granny's body down to the road camp, where he and Sisson salvaged enough good pine lumber to build a decent-enough coffin, the joints sealed with pine tar to keep it, at least temporarily, watertight. Then they loaded it onto the back of the wagon Jeff had brought her down in, tied it in securely, and started down the newly cut road toward Klondyke.

They reached Klondyke by midafternoon. Working together, changing off the pick and the shovel, they dug a grave in the hardpan and rock of the small mesa above Klondyke and buried her before dark. There was nothing to mark the grave with, so they erected a crude cross of sticks wired together with fencing wire.

Ola May had not expected the onslaught of loneliness that caught her up after Granny Jane's death. The old woman had been quarrelsome, abrupt, and imperious, but she had been company. Now Ola May lived at Power Garden alone, the sole keeper of the family's small cabin and farm.

She made trips nearly every day up the new road to the mine shack in Kielberg Canyon where Jeff, John, Tom, and Sisson, who was the only one of the road crew to stay on when the road was finished, worked the mine seven days a week. Some days, one of her brothers or Tom Sisson would bring a truckload of ore down the road, heading for Safford. Frequently, the driver would stop for lunch, or at least water and biscuits, and a small part of the day would fill and quickly pass. But then, just as quickly, time would stall and seem to stand still as Ola May worked the afternoon away, dreading the coming of evening and dark.