Yet, it gave him a most disconcerting, uncanny start, when one
bright winter day, he faced the fact that he, too, was about to
be shovelled into the great dust-bin. Death was actually at his
side, his long, bony finger on his shoulder and whispering
impersonally, "You're next." "Very much," thought Martin, "like a
barber on a busy Saturday." How odd that here was something that
had never entered into his schemes, his carefully worked out
plans! It seemed so unfair--why, he had been feeling so well, his
business had been going on so profitably, there was something so
substantial to the jog of his life, there seemed to be something
of the eternal about it. He had taken ten-year mortgages but a
few days ago, and had bought two thousand dollars' worth of
twenty-year Oklahoma municipals when he could have taken an
earlier issue which he had rejected as maturing too soon. He had
forgotten that there was a stranger who comes but once, and now
that he was here, Martin felt that a mean trick had been played
on him. He cogitated on the journey he was to take, and it made
him not afraid, but angry. It was a shabby deal--that's what it
was--when he was so healthy and contented, only sixty-one and
ready to go on for decades--two or three at least--forced,
instead, to prepare to lay himself in a padded box and be
hurriedly packed away. It had always seemed so vague, this
business of dying, and now it was so personal--he, Martin Wade,
himself, not somebody else, would suffer a little while longer
and then grow still forever.

He would never know how sure a breeder was his new bull--the son
of that fine creature he had imported; two cows he had spotted as
not paying their board could go on for months eating good alfalfa