The way of the silent little procession led through back streets--where
women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--and came
to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half
dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most
bedraggled outskirts.

A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger
of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of
the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning
in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the
keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter
stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet
brow, and looked--one could have sworn impassively--into his staring
eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door,
and led the way herself.

Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a
dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by
the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon
the open door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old
Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed
limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry