Together
they bend over that which had been Tom Hamon, and their faces are grim
and hard as the rocks about them. Not that they are indifferent, but
that any show of feeling would be looked upon as a sign of weakness.
Under such circumstances men at times give vent to jocularities which
sound coarse and shocking. But they are not meant so--simply the protest
of the rough spirit at being thought capable of such unmanly weakness as
feeling.
But these men were elementally silent. One look had shown them there was
nothing to be done but that which they had come to do--to carry what
they had found back to the waiting crowd at the Creux.
They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make
close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them, and the
rough hands lifted him, and bore him to the boat as tenderly as though a
jar or a stumble might add to his pains.
And so, but with slower strokes now, as though that slight additional
burden, that single passenger, weighed them to the water's edge, they
crawl slowly back the way they came, logged, not with water, but with
the presence of death.
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