But dead--no; he was only very, very ill. He had,
withal, the invalid's apathy and did not greatly con-
cern himself about the uncommon fate that had been
allotted to him. No philosopher was he--just a
plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time be-
ing, with a pathological indifference: the organ that
he feared consequences with was torpid. So, with
no particular apprehension for his immediate fu-
ture, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry
Armstrong.
But something was going on overhead. It was a
dark summer night, shot through with infrequent
shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying
low in the west and portending a storm. These brief,
stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly
distinctness the monuments and headstones of the
cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was
not a night in which any credible witness was likely
to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men
who were there, digging into the grave of Henry
Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.
Two of them were young students from a medi-
cal college a few miles away; the third was a gigan-
tic negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had
been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-
work and it was his favourite pleasantry that he
knew 'every soul in the place.' From the nature of
what he was now doing it was inferable that the
place was not so populous as its register may have
shown it to be.
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