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 room, composing his frozen limbs as best they could. He was frozen solid. On one side of his head was a deep gash where he had hit against something hard and sharp when he had fallen from the wagon. In the inside pocket of his coat they found a check for a hundred and seventy-three dollars and eighty-six cents, the payment for his year's work.

The coroner, a little parchment-skinned man, found that he had come to his death by freezing.

"Like enough he started to freeze an' lost his senses an' fell off the wagon," he said to the men assembled in the barnyard. "An' he would of come to when he fell if the blow on his head hadn't 'a' stunned him. Well, it's a dirty shame. He's gone, poor lad, an' one o' the best fellers I ever knowed."

"He wouldn't of started to freeze if he hadn't a been drinkin'," put in Bob Crupper, who had himself just got back from Lexington. "He was a-drinkin' heavy in taown yestiddy. He tuk it hard—the drop in the market—an' he drunk a good many drinks to try an' cheer hisse'f up. Then on the way home the numbness set in on him. If I'd ever had a notion what was a-goin' to happen to him I'd a kep' alongside of him on the way back. But anybody can't know these things till it's too late."

"That's what comes o' bein' a drinkin' man," said Uncle Joe Patton, who was one of the few total abstainers of the neighborhood.

"Waal, he's saved hisse'f a lot o' disappointments," opined Jabez Moorhouse. "The old sayin' is the good dies young. But if I was havin' it my way I'd say the lucky dies young. They don't live long enough to find out haow little there is to make life wuth livin'."

"I dunno about that," drawled Uncle Sam Whitmarsh in his deliberate way. "I'm a-goin' to be seventy-one, come the twenty-eighth o' nex' month. An' I can't say I call to mind any time I've wished the pigs'ud et me when I was little. Dan wanted to live, an' he had a right to live, poor feller, an' it's all the fault o' the God damned terbaccer company that won't give us close markets fer our crops. The idee of havin'