The days of that April had been days of mist and rain. Sometimes, for hours,
there would come a miracle of blue sky, white cloud, and yellow light, but
always between dark and dark the rain would fall and the mist creep up the
mountains and steam from the tops--only to roll together from either range,
drip back into the valleys, and lift, straightway, as mist again. So that, all
the while Nature was trying to give lustier life to every living thing in the
lowland Bluegrass, all the while a gaunt skeleton was stalking down the
Cumberland--tapping with fleshless knuckles, now at some unlovely cottage of
faded white and green, and now at a log cabin, stark and gray. Passing the
mouth of Lonesome, he flashed his scythe into its unlifeing shadows and went
stalking on. High up, at the source of the dismal little stream, the point of
the shining blade darted thrice into the open door of a cabin set deep into a
shaggy flank of Black Mountain, and three spirits, within, were quickly loosed
from aching flesh for the long flight into the unknown.

It was the spirit of the plague that passed, taking with it the breath of the
unlucky and the unfit: and in the hut on Lonesome three were dead--a gaunt
mountaineer, a gaunt daughter, and a gaunt son. Later, the mother, too, "jes'
kind o' got tired," as little Chad said, and soon to her worn hands and feet
came the well-earned rest. Nobody was left then but Chad and Jack, and Jack
was a dog with a belly to feed and went for less than nothing with everybody
but his little master and the chance mountaineer who had sheep to guard. So,
for the fourth time, Chad, with Jack at his heels, trudged up to the point of
a wooded spur above the cabin, where, at the foot of a giant poplar and under
a wilderness of shaking June leaves, were three piles of rough boards, loosely
covering three hillocks of rain-beaten earth; and, near them, an open grave.
There was no service sung or spoken over the dead, for the circuit-rider was
then months away; so, unnoticed, Chad stood behind the big poplar, watching
the neighbors gently let down into the shallow trench a home-made coffin,