and his assertion that he expected to go into business only made the men laugh when Perkins left a group of them.  They were not interested in Perkins by the following Saturday; and Monday every man in the town felt that his judgment of a man who would go fishing every day had been handsomely vindicated, when it was learned that Perkins had served in the Confederate army.  When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as “no-’count.”  In the third spring, after a winter’s tussle with rheumatism, Perkins died.  His funeral was of so little importance that none of the corpulent old ladies in black alpaca, holding their handkerchiefs carefully folded in their hands, came panting across the town to attend it.  No women came at all.  And the Perkins boy stood by stolidly while the dry clods were rumbling upon the pine box in the grave.  The boy wished to be alone, and he would not sit on the seat with the driver.  He wiped a little moisture from his eyes, and rode to town with his feet hanging out of the back of the wagon that had held the coffin.

[Illustration:  His feet hanging out of the back of the wagon that had held the coffin.]

When the wagon came to the thick of the town, Bud Perkins quietly slid to the ground, and joined a group of afternoon idlers who were playing marbles on the south side of a livery barn.  Here and there in the group a boy said:  “H’lo, Bud,” when the Perkins boy joined the coterie, but many of the youngsters, being unfamiliar with the etiquette of mourning, were silent, and played on at their game.  When the opportunity came the Perkins boy put a marble in the ring without saying a word.  He went back to “taws,” and “lagged for goes,” with the others.  He spoke only when he was addressed.  A black sense of desolation lowered over him, and he could not join in the ejaculations and responses of the game.  His luck was bad, and he lost marble after marble.  In an hour, when the sun was still in the south, he withdrew from the game and sat alone against the barn, drawing figures on the earth with a broken piece of hoop-iron.  The boy could not fight off the thought of the empty home waiting for him down by the river.  He saw, as he sat there, all the furniture, his father’s clothes hanging at the foot of the bed, the stove in disorder; and then he realized that in the whole town not one hand was held out to him.  He was a child, yet the heartlessness of it all cut him to the quick.  This thought overwhelmed him, again and again, each time with more agonizing force, like an increasing wave, and as one flood washed over him with fiercer passion than the others, the boy rose hurriedly, ran around the barn, and flung himself upon a pile of hay.  There he gave way to a storm of sobs.  One of the group, who had been watching him more closely than the others, soon withdrew from the game, and going in the opposite direction from that taken by Bud Perkins, came tiptoeing around the haystack.