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"What was it happened, Mr Abel?" Marsali still clasped his hand, though it lay quite limp, palm-down on the red kerchief

MacLennan looked up then, blinking

"Oh," he said vaguely "So much happened And yetnot really very ail, ot cold, andshe died" He sounded faintly surprised

Jamie poured a bit of whisky into an e hands, and folded it around the cup, holding the fingers in place with his own, until MacLennan’s hand tightened its grasp

"Drink it,as MacLennan obediently tasted the whisky, sipped, sipped again Young Private Ogilvie shifted uneasily on his stone, looking as though he should like to return to his regi an abrupt departure ht somehow injure MacLennan further

MacLennan’s very stillness drew every eye, froze all talk My hand hovered uneasily over the bottles in h," he said suddenly "I did" He looked up fro anyone to dispute hiht have been, but I was careful I’d ten bushels of corn put aside, and four good deer hides It orth s of the tax"

But the taxes must be paid in hard currency; not in corn and hides and blocks of indigo, as the farmers did their business Barter was the colancing down at the bag of odd things folk had brought me in pay in money--save the taxes

"Well, that’s only reasonable," said MacLennan, blinking earnestly at Private Ogilvie, as though the youngwi’ a herd of pigs, or a brace of turkeys, now, can he? No, I see quite hy it must be hard ht six shillings, easy"

The only difficulty, of course, lay in turning ten bushels of corn into six shillings of tax There were those in Drunkard’s Creek who --but no one in Drunkard’s Creek had money, either No, the corn must be taken to market in Saleht be obtained But Salem lay nearly forty miles from Drunkard’s Creek--a week’s journey, there and back

"I’d five acres in late barley," Abel explained "Ripe and yellochtie, achin’ for the scythe I couldna leave it to be spoilt, andand threshing"

Unable to spare a week frohbors

"They’re guid folk," he insisted "One or two could spare me the odd penny--but they’d their ain taxes to pay, hadn’t they?" Still hoping so the arduous trip to Sale

"Howard Travers is Sheriff," he said, and wiped unconsciously at the drop of moisture that formed at the end of his nose "He came with a paper, and said he mun’ put us oot, and the taxes not paid"

Faced with necessity, Abel had left his wife in their cabin, and gone posthaste to Sales in hand, his property had been seized and sold--to Howard Travers’s father-in-law--and his cabin was inhabited by strangers, his wife gone

"I kent she’d no go far," he explained "She’d not leave the bairns"

And that in fact here he found her, wrapped in a threadbare quilt and shivering under the big spruce tree on the hill that sheltered the graves of the four MacLennan children, all dead in their first year of life In spite of his entreaties, Abigail would not go down to the cabin that had been theirs, would seek no aid from those who had dispossessed her If it was ripped her, or only stubbornness, he could not tell; she had clung to the branches of the tree with de out the naht

His whisky cup was e Jaiven her leave to carry ahat she could She’d a bundle with her, and her grave-claes in it I ken weel her sitting down the day after ed, to spin her winding-sheet It had wee flowers all along one edge, that she’d ail in her eest child, and then walked two ht, to tell the Hobsons what had happened

"But I cah Fowles had had a visit frorinned like an ape and said it was all one to hi wi’ a paper and three men, and put them oot"

Hobson had scraped up the money to pay his own taxes, and the Fowleses were crowded in safely enough with the rest of the fa rath over the treatment of his son-in-law

"He was a-rantin’, Joe, bleezin’ mad wi’ fury Janet Hobson bid me come and sit, and offered me supper, and there was Joe shoutin’ that he’d take the price of the land out of Howard Travers’s hide, and Hugh slureetin’, and the weans all squealin’ for their dinners like a brood o’ piglets, andwell, I thought of telling theh confused anew

Sitting half-forgotten in the chiue, one that y stealing over him It arm, and he was overcome with a sense of unreality If the crowded confines of the Hobsons’ one-roomed cabin were not real, neither was the quiet hillside and its fresh grave beneath the spruce tree