With
bare heads, their shaggy hair falling wildly about their faces, their
lips set tight to choke back their grief, the few at the post went,
one by one, into the little cabin, and gazed for the last time upon
her face. There was but one sound other than the gentle tread of their
moccasined feet, and that was a catching, sobbing moan that fell from
the thick gray beard of Williams, the old factor.
After that they carried her to where a clearing had been cut in the
edge of the forest; and at the foot of a giant spruce, towering
sentinel-like to the sky, they lowered her into the frozen earth.
Gaspingly, Williams stumbled over the words on a ragged page that had
been torn from a Bible. The rough men who stood about him bowed their
wild heads upon their breasts, and sobs broke from them.
At last Williams stopped his reading, stretched his long arms above
his head, and cried chokingly:
"The great God keep Mees Cummins!"
As the earth fell, there came from the edge of the forest the low,
sweet music of Jan Thoreau's violin. No man in all the world could
have told what he played, for it was the music of Jan's soul, wild and
whispering of the winds, sweetened by some strange inheritance that
had come to him with the picture which he carried in his throbbing
heart.
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