He is buried,
and his watch with him--I saw to that. May God
rest his soul in Paradise, and the soul of his Vir-
ginian ancestor, if, indeed, they are two souls.
THE DAMNED THING
1: One Does Not Always Eat What is on the Table
BY the light of a tallow candle which had been placed
on one end of a rough table a man was reading some-
thing written in a book. It was an old account book,
greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently,
very legible, for the man sometimes held the page
close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light
on it. The shadow of the book would then throw
into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a num-
ber of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight
other men were present. Seven of them sat against
the rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room
being small, not very far from the table. By extend-
ing an arm anyone of them could have touched the
eighth man, who lay on the table, face upward,
partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his sides. He
was dead.
The man with the book was not reading aloud,
and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for some-
thing to occur; the dead man only was without ex-
pectation. From the blank darkness outside came
in, through the aperture that served for a window,
all the ever unfamiliar noises of night in the wilder-
ness--the long nameless note of a distant coyote;
the stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees;
strange cries of night birds, so different from those
of the birds of day; the drone of great blundering
beetles, and all that mysterious chorus of small
sounds that seem always to have been but half
heard when they have suddenly ceased, as if con-
scious of an indiscretion.
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