going to die two or three times the year, and bother
the Father... But I wouldn't wonder they would,
and them working for Hollidew, dawn, day and
dark, with never a proper skinful of food, only this
and that, maybe, chick'ry and fat pork and moldy
ends of nothing."

He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in
his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless
gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke
trailing from his sunken lips might well have been
the spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior.

"Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued,
"it hurts him like a cut with a hick'ry to
see a dollar go. They say he won't hear tell of
quitting his fortune for purgatory, no, nor for
heaven neither. He can't get him to make a will,
the lawyer can't. He was telling the Father the
other day, sitting right in the house there, 'Pompey
Hollidew,' he says, 'won't even talk will...'
He'd like to take it all with him to the devil, Pompey
would." He turned with a sigh to the log. A crosscut
saw, with a handle at either end, lay upon the
ground; and Gordon, grasping the far handle,
helped him to drag the slim, glittering steel through
the powdering fiber of the wood.

As he worked mechanically Gordon's thoughts returned
to the past, the past which had collapsed

[[111]]

p110 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p111w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p112

v?