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In reply to questions he only muttered with a trace of his old spirit: “I’m all right. Jest as good a man as I ever was, only I’m cold. I’ll be all right when spring comes, so ‘t I c’n git outdoors. Somethin’ to warm me up, yessir; I’m cold, that’s all.”

The young fellow sat in awe before him, but the old wife and Bill moved about the room, taking very little interest in what the old man said or did. Bill at last took down the violin. “I’ll wake him up,” he said. “This always fetches the old feller. Now watch ‘im.”

“Oh, don’t do that!” Milton said, in horror. But Bill drew the bow across the strings in the same way that Daddy always did when tuning up.

He lifted his head as Bill dashed into “Honest John,” in spite of Milton’s protest. He trotted his feet after a little and drummed with his hands on the arms of his chair, then smiled a little in a pitiful way. Finally he reached out his right hand for the violin and took it into his lap. He tried to hold the neck with his poor, old, mutilated left hand and burst into tears.

“Don’t you do that again, Bill,” Milton said. “It’s better for him to forget that. Now you take the best care of him you can to-night. I don’t think he’s going to live long; I think you ought to go for the doctor right off.”

“Oh, he’s been like this for the last two weeks; he ain’t sick, he’s jest old, that’s all,” replied Bill, brutally.

And the old lady, moving about without passion and without speech, seemed to confirm this; and yet Milton was unable to get the picture of the old man out of his mind. He went home with a great lump in his throat.

* * * * *

The next morning, while they were at breakfast, Bill burst wildly into the room.

“Come over there, all of you; we want you.”

They all looked up much scared. “What’s the matter, Bill?”

“Daddy’s killed himself,” said Bill, and turned to rush back, followed by Mr. Jennings and Milton.

While on the way across the field Bill told how it all happened.

“He wouldn’t go to bed, the old lady couldn’t make him, and when I got up this morning I didn’t think nothin’ about it. I s’posed, of course, he’d gone to bed all right, but when I was going out to the barn I stumbled across something in the snow, and I felt around, and there he was. He got hold of my revolver someway. It was on the shelf by the washstand, and I s’pose he went out there so’t we wouldn’t hear him.”

“I dassn’t touch him,” he said, with a shiver; “and the old woman, she jest slumped down in a chair an set there–wouldn’t do a thing–so I come over to see you.”

Milton’s heart swelled with remorse. He felt guilty because he had not gone directly for the doctor. To think that the old sufferer had killed himself was horrible and seemed impossible.

The wind was blowing the snow, cold and dry, across the yard, but the sun shone brilliantly upon the figure in the snow as they came up to it. There Daddy lay. The snow was in his scant hair and in the hollow of his vast, half-naked chest. A pistol was in his hand, but there was no mark upon him, and Milton’s heart leaped with quick relief. It was delirium, not suicide.

There was a sort of majesty in the figure half-buried in the snow. His hands were clenched, and there was a frown of resolution on his face, as if he had fancied Death coming and had gone defiantly forth to meet him.