Ruth Lansing had come twice to the county jail in Danton with his mother to see Jeffrey. They had not been left alone, but she had clung to him and kissed him boldly as though by her right before all men. The first time he had watched her sharply, looking almost savagely to see her shrink away from him in pity and fear of his guilt, as he had seen men who had been his friends shrink away from him. But there had been not a shadow of that in Ruth, and his heart leaped now as he remembered how she had walked unafraid into his arms, looking him squarely and bravely in the eyes and crying to him to forget the foolish words that she had said to him that last day in the hills. In that pulsing moment Jeffrey had looked into her eyes and had seen there not the love of the little girl that he had known but the unbounded love and confidence of the woman who would give herself to him for life or death. He had seen it; the look of all the women of earth who love, whose feet go treading in tenderness and undying pity, whose hands are fashioned for the healing of torn hearts.

It was only when she had gone, and when he in the loneliness of his cell was reliving the hour, that he remembered that she had scarcely listened to his story of the morning in the hills. Of course, she had heard his story from his mother and was probably already so familiar with it that it had lost interest for her. But no, that was not like Ruth. She was always a direct little person, who wanted to know the exact how and why of everything first hand. She would not have been satisfied with anybody's telling of the matter but his own.

Then a horrible suspicion leaped into his mind and struck at his heart. Could it be that she had over-acted it all? Could it be that she had brushed aside his story because she really did not believe it and could not listen to it without betraying her doubt? And had she blinded him with her pity? Had she acted all—!

He threw himself down on his cot and writhed in blind despair. Might not even his mother have deceived him! Might not she too have been acting! What did he care now for name or liberty, or life itself! The girl had mocked him with what he thought was love, when it was only—!

But his good sense brought him back and set him on his feet. Ruth was no actress. And if she had been the greatest actress the world had ever seen she could not have acted that flooding love light into her eyes.

He threw back his head, laughing softly, and began to pace his cell rapidly. There was some other explanation. Either she had deliberately put his story aside in order to keep the whole of their little time together entirely to themselves, or Ruth knew something that made his story unimportant.

She had been through the fire herself. Both she and the Bishop must have gone straight through it from their home in its front line to the rear of it at French Village. How, no one could tell. Jeffrey had heard wild tales of the exploit— The French people had made many wonders of the coming of these two to them in the hour of their deliverance, the one the Bishop of their souls, the other the young girl just baptised by Holy Church and but little differing from the angels.

Who could tell, thought Jeffrey, what the fire might have revealed to one or both of these two as they went through it. Perhaps there were other men who had not been accounted for. Then he remembered Rafe Gadbeau. He had been with Rogers. He had once waylaid Jeffrey at Rogers' command. Might it not be that the bullet which killed Rogers was intended for Jeffrey himself! He must have been almost in the line of that bullet, for Rogers had been facing him squarely and the bullet had struck Rogers fairly in the back of the head.

Or again, people had said that Rogers had possessed some sort of mysterious hold over Rafe Gadbeau, and that Gadbeau did his bidding unwillingly, under a pressure of fear. What if Gadbeau there under the excitement of the fire, and certain that another man would be charged with the killing, had decided that here was the time and place to rid himself of the man who had made him his slave!

The thing fascinated him, as was natural; and, pacing his cell, stopping between mouthfuls of his food as he sat at the jail table, sitting up in his cot in the middle of the night to think, Jeffrey caught at every scrap of theory and every thread of fact that would fit into the story as it must have happened. He wandered into many blind trails of theory and explanation, but, strange as it was, he at last came upon the truth—and stuck to it.

Gadbeau had killed Rogers. Gadbeau had been caught in the fire and had almost burned to death. He had managed to reach the place where Ruth and the Bishop had found refuge. He had died there in their presence. He had confessed. The Catholics always told the truth when they were going to die. Ruth and the Bishop had heard him. Ruth knew. The Bishop knew.

When Ruth came again, he watched her closely; and saw—just what he had expected to see. Ruth knew. It was not only her love and her confidence in him. She had none of the little whispering, torturing doubts that must sometimes, unbidden, rise to frighten even his mother. Ruth knew.

That she should not tell him, or give him any outward hint of what she was hiding in her mind, did not surprise him. It was a very serious matter this with Catholics. It was a sacred matter with anybody, to carry the secret of a dead man. Ruth would not speak unnecessarily of it. When the proper time came, and there was need, she would speak. For the present—Ruth knew. That was enough.

When the Bishop came down from Alden to see him, Jeffrey watched him as he had watched Ruth. He had never been very observant. He had never had more than a boy's careless indifference and disregard of details in his way of looking at men and things. But much thinking in the dark had now given him intuitions that were now sharp and sensitive as those of a woman. He was quick to know that the grip of the Bishop's hand on his, the look of the Bishop's eye into his, were not those of a man who had been obliged to fight against doubts in order to keep his faith in him. That grip and that look were not those of a man who wished to believe, who tried to believe, who told himself and was obliged to keep on telling himself that he believed in spite of all. No. Those were the grip and the look of a man who knew. The Bishop knew.

It was even easier to understand the Bishop's silence than it had been to see why Ruth might not speak of what she knew. The Bishop was an official in a high place, entrusted with a dark secret. He must not speak of such things without a very serious cause. But, of course, there was nothing in this world so sacred as the life of an innocent man. Of course, when the time and the need came, the Bishop would speak.

So Jeffrey had pieced together his fragments of fact and deduction. So he had watched and discovered and reasoned and debated with himself. He had not, of course, said a word of these things to any one. The result was that, while he listened to the plans which his lawyer, young Emmet Dardis, laid for his defence—plans which, in the face of the incontestable facts which would be brought against them, would certainly amount to little or nothing—he really paid little attention to them. For, out of his reasoning and out of the things his heart felt, he had built up around himself an inner citadel, as it were, of defence which no attack could shake. He had come to feel, had made himself feel, that his life and his name were absolutely safe in the keeping of these two people—the one a girl who loved him and who would give her life for him, and the other a true friend, a man of God, a true man. He had nothing to fear. When the time came these two would speak. It was true that he was outwardly depressed by the concise and bitter conviction in the words of the prosecuting attorney. For Lemuel Squires was of the character that makes the most terrible of criminal prosecutors—an honest, narrow man who was always absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused from the moment that a charge had been made. But inwardly he had no fear.

The weight of evidence that would be brought against him, the fact that his own best friends would be obliged to give their oaths against him, the very feeling of being accused and of having to scheme and plan to prove his innocence to a world that—except here and there—cared not a whit whether he was innocent or guilty, all these things bowed his head and brought his eyes down to the floor. But they could not touch that inner wall that he had built around himself. Ruth knew; the Bishop knew.

The rasping speech of the prosecutor was finished at last.

Old Erskine Beasley was the first witness called.

The prosecuting attorney took him sharply in hand at once for though he had been called as a witness for the prosecution it was well known that he was unwilling to testify at all. So the attorney had made no attempt to school him beforehand, and he was determined now to allow him to give only direct answers to the questions put to him.

Two or three times the old man attempted to explain, at the end of an answer, just why he had gone up into the high hills the night before the twentieth of August—that he had heard that Rogers and a band of men had gone into the woods to start fires. But he was ordered to stop, and these parts of his answers were kept out of the record. Finally he was rebuked savagely by the Judge and ordered to confine himself to answering the lawyer's questions, on pain of being arrested for contempt. It was a high-handed proceeding that showed the temper and the intention of the Judge and a stir of protest ran around the courtroom. But old Erskine Beasley was quelled. He gave only the answers that the prosecutor forced from him.

"Did you hear a shot fired?" he was asked.

"Yes."

"Did you hear two shots fired?"

"No."

"Did you see Jeffrey Whiting's gun?"

"Yes."

"Did you examine it?"

"Yes."

"Had it been fired off?"

"Yes."

"Excused," snapped the prosecutor. And the old man, almost in tears, came down from the stand. He knew that his simple yes and no answers had made the most damaging sort of evidence.

Then the prosecutor went back in the story to establish a motive. He called several witnesses who had been agents of the railroad and associated in one way or another with the murdered man in his efforts to get options on the farm lands in the hills. Even these witnesses, though they were ready to give details and opinions which might have been favorable to his side of the case, he held down strictly to answering with a word his own carefully thought out questions.

With these answers the prosecutor built up a solid continuity of cause and effect from the day when Rogers had first come into the hills to offer Jeffrey Whiting a part in the work with himself right up to the moment when the two had faced each other that morning on Bald Mountain.

He showed that Jeffrey Whiting had begun to undermine and oppose Rogers' work from the first. He showed why. Jeffrey Whiting came of a family well known and trusted in the hills. The young man had been quick to grasp the situation and to believe that he could keep the people from dealing at all with Rogers. Rogers' work would then be a failure. Jeffrey Whiting would then be pointed to as the only man who could get the options from the people. They would sell or hold out at his word. The railroad would have to deal with him direct, and at his terms.

Jeffrey Whiting had gotten promises from many of the owners that they would not sell or even sign any paper until such time as he gave them the word. Did those promises bind the people to him? They did. Did they have the same effect as if Jeffrey Whiting had obtained actual options on the property? Yes. Would the people stand by their promises? Yes. Then Whiting had actually been obtaining what were really options to himself, while pretending to hold the people back in their own interest? Yes.

The prosecutor went on to draw out answer after answer tending to show that it was not really a conflict between the people and the railroad that had been making trouble in the hills all summer; that it was, in fact, merely a personal struggle for influence and gain between Jeffrey Whiting and the man who had been killed. It was skilfully done and drawn out with all the exaggerated effect of truth which bald negative and affirmative answers invariably carry.

He went on to show that a bitter hatred had grown up between the two men. Rogers had been accused of hiring men to get Whiting out of the way at a time in the early summer when many of the people about French Village had been prepared to sign Rogers' options. Rogers had been obliged to fly from the neighbourhood on account of Whiting's anger. He had not returned to the hills until the day before he was killed.

The people in the hills had talked freely of what had happened on Bald Mountain on the morning of August twentieth and in the hills during the afternoon and night preceding. The prosecutor knew the incidents and knew what men had said to each other. He now called Myron Stocking.

"Did you meet Jeffrey Whiting on the afternoon of August nineteenth?" was the question.

"I went lookin' for him, to tell—"

"Answer, yes or no?" shouted the attorney.

"Yes," the witness admitted sullenly.

"Did you tell him that Rogers was in the hills?"

"Yes."

"Did he take his gun from you and start immediately?"

"He followed me," the witness began. But the Judge rapped warningly and the attorney yelled:

"Yes or no?"

"Yes."

"Did you see Rogers in the morning?"

"Yes, he was settin' fire to—" The Judge hammering furiously with his gavel drowned his words. The attorney went on:

"Did you hear a shot?"

"Yes."

"Did you hear two shots?"

"The fire"—was making a lot of noise, he tried to say. But his voice was smothered by eruptions from the court and the attorney. He was finally obliged to say that he had heard but one shot. Then he was asked:

"What did you say when you came up and saw the dead man?"

"I said, 'Mine got away, Jeff.'"

"What else did you say?"

"I said, 'What's the difference, any of us would've done it if we had the chance.'"

"Whiting's gun had been fired?" asked the attorney, working back.

"Yes."

"One question more and I will excuse you," said the attorney, with a show of friendliness—"I see it is hard for you to testify against your friend. Did you, standing there with the facts fresh before you, conclude that Jeffrey Whiting had fired the shot which killed Rogers?"

To this Emmet Dardis vigorously objected that it was not proper, that the answer would not be evidence. But the Judge overruled him sharply, reminding him that this witness had been called by the prosecution, that it was not the business of opposing counsel to protect him. The witness found himself forced to answer a simple yes.

One by one the other men who had been present that fatal morning were called. Their answers were identical, and as each one was forced to give his yes to that last fateful question, condemning Jeffrey Whiting out of the mouths of his friends who had stood on the very ground of the murder, it seemed that every avenue of hope for him was closing.

On cross-examination, Emmet Dardis could do little with the witnesses. He was gruffly reminded by the Judge that the witnesses were not his, that he must not attempt to draw any fresh stories from them, that he might only examine them on the facts which they had stated to the District Attorney. And as the prosecutor had pinned his witnesses down absolutely to answers of known fact, there was really nothing in their testimony that could be attacked.

With a feeling of uselessness and defeat, Emmet Dardis let the last witness go. The State promptly rested its case.

Dardis began calling his witnesses. He realised how pitifully inadequate their testimony would be when placed beside the chain of facts which the District Attorney had pieced together. They were in the main character witnesses, hardly more. They could tell only of their long acquaintance with Jeffrey Whiting, of their belief in him, of their firm faith that in holding the people back from giving the options to Rogers and the railroad he had been acting in absolute good faith and purely in the interests of the people. Not one of these men had been near the scene of the murder, for the railroad had planned its campaign comprehensively and had subpoenaed for its side every man who could have had any direct knowledge of the events leading up to the tragedy. As line after line of their testimony was stricken from the record, as being irrelevant, it was seen that the defence had little or no case. Finally the Judge, tiring of ruling on the single objections, made a general ruling that no testimony which did not tend to reveal the identity of the man who had shot Rogers could go into the record.

Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden sat anxiously watching the course of the trial. Beside him sat little Father Ponfret from French Village. The little French priest looked up from time to time and guardedly studied the long angular white head of his bishop as it towered above him. He did not know, but he could guess some of the struggle that was going on in the mind and the heart of the Bishop.

The Bishop had come down to the trial to give what aid he could, in the way of showing his confidence and faith, to the case of the boy who stood in peril of his life. In the beginning, when he had first heard of Jeffrey's arrest, he had not thought it possible that, even had he been guilty of actually firing the shot, Jeffrey could be convicted under such circumstances. Men must see that the act was in defence of life and property. But as he listened to the progress of the trial he realised sadly that he had very much underestimated the seriousness of the railroad people in the matter and the hold which they had upon the machinery of justice in Racquette County.

He had gladly offered to go upon the stand and tell the reason why Jeffrey Whiting had entered into this fight against the railroad. He would associate himself and his own good name with the things that Jeffrey Whiting had done, so that the two might stand before men together. But he now saw that it would be of no avail. His words would be swept aside as irrelevant.

One thing and only one thing would now avail Jeffrey Whiting. This morning on his arrival in Danton, the Bishop had been angered at learning that the two men whose lives he had saved that night by the lake at French Village had escaped from the train as they were being brought from Lowville to Danton to testify at this trial.

Whether they could have told anything of value to Jeffrey Whiting was not known. Certainly they were now gone, and, almost surely, by the connivance of the railroad people. The Bishop had their confession in his pocket at this minute, but there was nothing in it concerning the murder. He had intended to read it into the record of the trial. He saw that he would not be allowed to do so.

One thing and only one thing would now avail Jeffrey Whiting. Jeffrey Whiting would be condemned to death, unless, within the hour, a man or woman should rise up in this room and swear: Jeffrey Whiting did not kill Samuel Rogers. Rafe Gadbeau did the deed. I saw him. Or—He told me so.

The Bishop remembered how that day last winter he had set the boy upon this course which had brought him here into this court and into the shadow of public disgrace and death. If Jeffrey Whiting had actually fired the shot that had cut off a human life, would not he, Joseph, Bishop of Alden, have shared a measure of the responsibility? He would.

And if Jeffrey Whiting, through no fault of his own, but through a chain of circumstances, stood now in danger of death, was not he, Joseph Winthrop, who had started the boy into the midst of these circumstances, in a way responsible? He was.

Could Joseph Winthrop by rising up in this court and saying: "Rafe Gadbeau killed Samuel Rogers—He told me so"—could he thus save Jeffrey Whiting from a felon's fate? He could. Nine words, no more, would do.

And if he could so save Jeffrey Whiting and did not do what was necessary—did not speak those nine words—would he, Joseph Winthrop, be responsible for the death or at least the imprisonment and ruin of Jeffrey Whiting? He would.

Then what would Joseph Winthrop do? Would he speak those nine words? He would not.

There was no claim of life or death that had the force to break the seal and let those nine words escape his lips.

There was no conflict, no battle, no indecision in the Bishop's mind as he sat there waiting for his name to be called. He loved the boy who sat there in the prisoner's stand before him. He felt responsible for him and the situation in which he was. He cared nothing for the dead man or the dead man's secret, as such. Yet he would go up there and defy the law of humanity and the law of men, because he was bound by the law that is beyond all other law; the law of the eternal salvation of men's souls.

But there was no reasoning, no weighing of the issue in his mind. His course was fixed by the eternal Institution of God. There was nothing to be determined, nothing to be argued. He was caught between the greater and the lesser law and he could only stand and be ground between the working of the two.

If he had reasoned he would have said that Almighty God had ordained the salvation of men through the confession of sin. Therefore the salvation of men depended on the inviolability of the seal of the confessional. But he did not reason. He merely sat through his torture, waiting.

When his name was called, he walked heavily forward and took his place standing beside the chair that was set for him.

At Dardis' question, the Bishop began to speak freely and rapidly. He told of the coming of Jeffrey Whiting to him for advice. He repeated what he had said to the boy, and from that point went on to sketch the things that had been happening in the hills. He wanted to get clearly before the minds of the jurymen the fact that he had advised and directed Jeffrey Whiting in everything that the boy had done.

The Judge was loath to show any open discourtesy to the Bishop. But he saw that he must stop him. His story could not but have a powerful effect upon even this jury. Looking past the Bishop and addressing Dardis, he said:

"Is this testimony pertinent?"

"It is, if Your Honor pardon me," said the Bishop, turning quickly. "It goes to prove that Jeffrey Whiting could not have committed the crime charged, any more than I could have done so."

The Bishop did not stop to consider carefully the logic or the legal phraseology of his answer. He hurried on with his story to the jury. He related his message from Albany to Jeffrey Whiting. He told of his ride into the hills. He told of the capture of the two men in the night at French Village. They should be here now as witnesses. They had escaped. But he held in his hand a written confession, written and sealed by a justice of the peace, made by the two men. He would read this to the jury.

He began reading rapidly. But before he had gotten much past the opening sentences, the Judge saw that this would not do. It was the story of the plan to set the fire, and it must not be read in court.

He rapped sharply with his gavel, and when the Bishop stopped, he asked:

"Is the murder of Samuel Rogers mentioned in that paper?"

"No, Your Honor. But there are—"

"It is irrelevant," interrupted the Judge shortly. "It cannot go before the jury."

The Bishop was beaten; he knew he could do no more.

Emmet Dardis was desperate. There was not the slightest hope for his client—unless—unless. He knew that Rafe Gadbeau had made confession to the Bishop. He had wanted to ask the Bishop this morning, if there was not some way. He had not dared. Now he dared. The Bishop stood waiting for his further questions. There might be some way or some help, thought Dardis; maybe some word had dropped which was not a part of the real confession. He said quickly:

"You were with Rafe Gadbeau at his death?"

"I was."

"What did he say to you?"

Jeffrey Whiting leaned forward in his chair, his eyes eager and confident. His heart shouting that here was his deliverance. Here was the hour and the need! The Bishop would speak!

The Bishop's eyes fell upon the prisoner for an instant. Then he looked full into the eyes of his questioner and he answered:

"Nothing."

"That will do. Thank you, Bishop," said Dardis in a low, broken voice.

Jeffrey Whiting fell back in his chair. The light of confidence died slowly, reluctantly out of his eyes. The Bishop had spoken. The Bishop had lied! He knew! And he had lied!

As the Bishop walked slowly back to his seat, Ruth Lansing saw the terrible suffering of the spirit reflected in his face. If she were questioned about that night, she must do as he had done.

Mother in Heaven, she prayed in agony, must I do that? Can I do that?

Oh! She had never thought it would come to this. How could it happen like this! How could any one think that she would ever stand like this, alone in all the world, with the fate of her love in her hands, and not be able to speak the few little words that would save him to her and life!

She would save him! She would speak the words! What did she care for that wicked man who had died yelling out that he was a murderer? Why should she keep a secret of his? One night in the early summer she had lain all through the night in the woods outside a cabin and wished for a way to kill that man. Why should she guard a secret that was no good to him or to any one now?

Who was it that said she must not speak? The Catholic Church. Then she would be a Catholic no longer. She would renounce it this minute. She had never promised anything like this. But, on the instant, she knew that that would not free her. She knew that she could throw off the outward garment of the Church, but still she would not be free to speak the words. The Church itself could not free her from the seal of the secret. What use, then, to fly from the Church, to throw off the Church, when the bands of silence would still lie mighty and unbreakable across her lips.

That awful night on the Gaunt Rocks flamed up before her, and what she saw held her.

What she saw was not merely a church giving a sacrament. It was not the dramatic falling of a penitent at the feet of a priest. It was not a poor Frenchman of the hills screaming out his crime in the agony and fear of death.

What she saw was a world, herself standing all alone in it. What she saw was the soul of the world giving up its sin into the scale of God from which—Heart break or world burn!—that sin must never be disturbed.

As she went slowly across the front of the room in answer to her name, a girl came out of one of the aisles and stood almost in her path. Ruth looked up and found herself staring dully into the fierce, piercing eyes of Cynthe Cardinal. She saw the look in those eyes which she had recognised for the first time that day at French Village—the terrible mother-hunger look of love, ready to die for its own. And though the girl said nothing, Ruth could hear the warning words: Remember! You love Jeffrey Whiting.

How well that girl knew!

Dardis had called Ruth only to contradict a point which he had not been able to correct in the testimony of Myron Stocking. But since he had dared to bring up the matter of Rafe Gadbeau to the Bishop, he had become more desperate, and bolder. Ruth might speak. And there was always a chance that the dying man had said something to her.

"You were with Jeffrey Whiting on the afternoon when word was brought to him that suspicious men had been seen in the hills?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Was the name of Rogers mentioned by either Stocking or Whiting?"

"No, sir."

Then he flashed the question upon her:

"What did Rafe Gadbeau say when he was dying?"

Ruth staggered, quivering in every nerve. The impact of the sudden, startling question leaping upon her over-wrought mind was nothing to what followed. For, in answer to the question, there came a scream, a terrified, agonised scream, mingled of fright and remorse and—relief. A scream out of the fire. A scream from death. On my knee I dropped and shot him, shot Rogers as he stood.

Again Jeffrey Whiting leaned forward smiling. Again the inner citadel of his hope stood strong about him. Ruth was there to speak the word that would free him! Her love would set him free! It was the time. Ruth knew. He would rather have it this way. He was almost glad that the Bishop had lied. Ruth knew. Ruth would speak.

The words of that terrible scream went searing through Ruth's brain and down into the very roots of her being. Oh! for the power to shout them out to the ends of the earth!

But she looked levelly at Dardis and in a clear voice answered:

"Nothing."

Then, at his word, she stumbled down out of the stand.

Again Jeffrey Whiting fell back into his seat.

Ruth had lied!

The walls of his inner citadel had fallen in and crushed him.



VIII

SEIGNEUR DIEU, WHITHER GO I?

The Bishop walked brokenly from the courthouse and turned up the street toward the little church. He had not been the same man since his experience of those two terrible nights in the hills. They had aged him and shaken him visibly. But those nights of suffering and superhuman effort had only attacked him physically. They had broken the spring of his step and had drawn heavily upon the vigour and the vital reserves which his years of simple living had left stored up in him. He had fought with fire. He had looked death in the face. He had roused his soul to master the passions of men. No man who has already reached almost the full allotted span of life may do these things without showing the outward effects of them. But these things had struck only at the clay of the body. They had not touched the quick spirit of the man within.

The trial through which he had passed to-day had cut deep into the spiritual fibre of his being. If Joseph Winthrop had been given the alternative of speaking his secret or giving up his life, he would have offered the few years that might be his, without question or halting. For he was a man of simple, single mind. He never quibbled or thought of taking back any of the things which he had given to Christ. Thirty years ago he had made his compact with the Master, and he had never blinked the fact that every time a priest puts on a stole to receive the secret of another's soul he puts his life in pledge for the sanctity of that secret. It was a simple business, unclouded by any perplexities or confusion.

Never had he thought of the alternative which had this day been forced upon him. Years ago he had given his own life entire to Christ. The snapping of it here at this point or a few spaces farther on would be a matter of no more moment than the length of a thread. This world had nothing to give him, nothing to withhold from him. But to guard his secret at the cost of another life, and that a young, vigorous, battling life full of future and promise, full of youth and the glory of living, the life of a boy he loved—that was another matter. Never had he reckoned with a thing such as that. Life had always been so direct, so square-cut for Joseph Winthrop. To think right, to do right, to serve God; these things had always seemed very simple. But the thing that he had done to-day was breaking his heart. He could not have done otherwise. He had been given no choice, to be sure.

But was it possible that God would have allowed things to come to that issue, if somewhere, at some turn in that line of circumstances which had led up to this day, Joseph Winthrop had not done a wrong? It did not seem possible. Somewhere he had done wrong or he had done foolishly—and, where men go to direct the lives of others, to do unwisely is much the same as to do wickedly.

What use to go over the things that he had done, the things that he had advised? What use to say, here he had done his best, there he thought only of the right and the wise thing. Somewhere he had spoken foolishly, or he had been headstrong in his interference, or he had acted without thought and prayer. What use to go over the record? He could only carry this matter to God and let Him see his heart.

He stumbled in the half light of the darkened little church and sank heavily into the last pew. Out of the sorrow and anguish of his heart he cried out from afar to the Presence on the little altar, where he, Bishop of Alden, had often spoken with much authority.

When Cynthe Cardinal saw Ruth Lansing go up into the witness stand she sank down quietly into a front seat and seemed fairly to devour the other girl with the steady gaze of her fierce black eyes. She hung upon every fleeting wave of the contending emotions that showed themselves on Ruth's face. She was convinced that this girl knew that Rafe Gadbeau had confessed to the murder of Samuel Rogers and that Jeffrey Whiting was innocent. She had not thought that Ruth would be called as a witness, and Dardis, in fact, had only decided upon it at the last moment.

Once Cynthe Cardinal had been very near to hating this girl, for she had seen Rafe Gadbeau leave herself at a dance, one afternoon a very long time ago, and spend the greater part of the afternoon talking gaily to Ruth Lansing. Now Rafe Gadbeau was gone. There was nothing left of him whom Cynthe Cardinal had loved but a memory. But that memory was as much to her as was the life of Jeffrey Whiting to this other girl. She was sorry for the other girl. Who would not be? What would that girl do? If the question was not asked directly, it was not likely that the girl would tell what she knew. She would not wish to tell. She would certainly try to avoid it. But if the question came to her of a sudden, without warning, without time for thought? What then? Would that girl be strong enough to deny, to deny and to keep on denying?

Who could tell? The girl was a Catholic. But she was a convert. She did not know the terrible secret of the confessional as they knew it who had been born to the Faith.

Cynthe herself had meant to keep away from this trial. She knew it was no place for her to carry the awful secret that she had hidden away in her heart. No matter how deeply she might have it hidden, the fear hung over her that men would probe for it. A word, a look, a hint might be enough to set some on the search for it and she had had a superstition that it was a secret of a nature that it could not be hidden forever. Some day some one would tear it from her heart. She knew that it was dangerous for her to be in Danton during these days when the hill people were talking of nothing but the killing of Rogers and hunting for any possible fact that might make Jeffrey Whiting's story believable. But she had been drawn irresistibly to the trial and had sat all day yesterday and to-day listening feverishly, avidly to every word that was said, waiting to hear, and praying against hearing the name of the man she had loved. The idea of protecting his name and his memory from the blight of his deed had become more than a religion, more than a sacred trust to her. It filled not only her own thought and life but it seemed even to take up that great void in her world which Rafe Gadbeau had filled.

When she had heard his name mentioned in that sudden questioning of the Bishop, she had almost jumped from her seat to cry out to him that he must know nothing. But that was foolish, she reflected. They might as well have asked the stones on the top of the Gaunt Rocks to tell Rafe Gadbeau's secret as to ask it from the Bishop.

But this girl was different. You could not tell what she might do under the test. If she stood the test, if she kept the seal unbroken upon her lips, then would Cynthe be her willing slave for life. She would love that girl, she would fetch for her, work for her, die for her!

When that point-blank question came leaping upon the tortured girl in the stand, Cynthe rose to her feet. She expected to hear the girl stammer and blurt out something that would give them a chance to ask her further questions. But when she saw the girl reel and quiver in pain, when she saw her gasp for breath and self-control, when she saw the hunted agony in her eyes, a great light broke in upon the heart of Cynthe Cardinal. Here was not a pale girl of the convent who could not know what love was! Here was a woman, a sister woman, who could suffer, who for the sake of one greater thing could trample her love under foot, and who could and did sum it all up in one steady word—"Nothing."

Cynthe Cardinal revolted. Her quickened heart could not look at the torture of the other girl. She wanted to run forward and throw herself at the feet of the other girl as she came staggering down from the stand and implore her pardon. She wanted to cry out to her that she must tell! That no man, alive or dead, was worth all this! For Cynthe Cardinal knew that truth bitterly. Instead, she turned and ran like a frightened, wild thing out of the room and up the street.

She had seen the Bishop come direct from the little church to the court. And as she watched his face when he came down from the stand, she knew instinctively that he was going back there. Cynthe understood. Even M'sieur the Bishop who was so wise and strong, he was troubled. He thought much of the young Whiting. He would have business with God.

She slipped noiselessly in at the door of the church and saw the Bishop kneeling there at the end of the pew, bowed and broken.

He was first aware of her when he heard a frightened, hurrying whisper at his elbow. Some one was kneeling in the aisle beside him, saying:

Mon Pere, je me 'cuse.

The ritual would have told him to rise and go to the confessional. But here was a soul that was pouring its secret out to him in a torrential rush of words and sobs that would not wait for ritual. The Bishop listened without raising his head. He had neither the will nor the power to break in upon that cruel story that had been torturing its keeper night and day. He knew that it was true, knew what the end of it would be. But still he must be careful to give no word that would show that he knew what was coming. The French of the hills and of Beaupre was a little too rapid for him but it was easy to follow the thread of the story. When she had finished and was weeping quietly, the Bishop prompted gently.

"And now? my daughter."

"And now, Mon Pere, must I tell? I would not tell. I loved Rafe Gadbeau. As long as I shall live I shall love him. For his good name I would die. But I cannot see the suffering of that girl, Ruth. Mon Pere, it is too much! I cannot stand it. Yet I cannot go there before men and call my love a murderer. Consider, Mon Pere. There is another way. I, too, am guilty. I wished for the death of that man. I would have killed him myself, for he had made Rafe Gadbeau do many things that he would not have done. He made my love a murderer. I went to keep Rafe Gadbeau from the setting of the fire. But I would have killed that man myself with the gun if I could. So I hated him. When I saw him fall, I clapped my hands in glee. See, Mon Pere, I am guilty. And I called joyfully to my love to run with me and save himself, for he was now free from that man forever. But he ran in the path of the fire because he feared those other men.

"But see, Mon Pere, I am guilty. I will go and tell the court that I am the guilty one. I will say that my hand shot that man. See, I will tell the story. I have told it many times to myself. Such a straight story I shall tell. And they will believe. I will make them believe. And they will not hurt a girl much," she said, dropping back upon her native shrewdness to strengthen her plea. "The railroad does not care who killed Rogers. They want only to punish the young Whiting. And the court will believe, as I shall tell it."

"But, my daughter," said the Bishop, temporising. "It would not be true. We must not lie."

"But M'sieur the Bishop, himself," the girl argued swiftly, evidently separating the priest in the confessional from the great bishop in his public walk, "he himself, on the stand—"

The girl stopped abruptly.

The Bishop held the silence of the grave.

"Mon Pere will make me tell, then—the truth," she began. "Mon Pere, I cannot! I—!"

"Let us consider," the Bishop broke in deliberately. "Suppose he had told this thing to you when he was dying. You would have said to him: Your soul may not rest if you leave another to suffer for your deed. Would he not have told you to tell and clear the other man?"

"To escape Hell," said the girl quickly, "yes. He would have said: Tell everything; tell anything!" In the desolate forlornness of her grief she had not left to her even an illusion. Just as he was, she had known the man, good and bad, brave and cowardly—and had loved him. Would always love him.

"We will not speak of Hell," said the Bishop gently. "In that hour he would have seen the right. He would have told you to tell."

"But he confessed to M'sieur the Bishop himself," she retorted quickly, still seeming to forget that she was talking to the prelate in person, but springing the trap of her quick wit and sound Moral Theology back upon him with a vengeance, "and he gave him no leave to speak."

The Bishop in a panic hurried past the dangerous ground.

"If he had left a debt, would you pay it for him, my daughter?"

"Mon Pere, with the bones of my hands!"

"Consider, then, he is not now the man that you knew. The man who was blind and walked in dark places. He is now a soul in a world where a great light shines about him. He knows now that which he did not know here—Truth. He sees the things which here he did not see. He stands alone in the great open space of the Beyond. He looks up to God and cries: Seigneur Dieu, whither go I?

"And God replying, asks him why does he hesitate, standing in the open place. Would he come back to the world?

"And he answers: 'No, my God; but I have left a debt behind and another man's life stands in pledge for my debt; I cannot go forward with that debt unpaid.'

"Then God: 'And is there none to cancel the debt? Is there not one in all that world who loved you? Were you, then, so wicked that none loved you who will pay the debt?'

"And he will answer with a lifted heart: 'My God, yes; there was one, a girl; in spite of me, she loved me; she will make the debt right; only because she loved me may I be saved; she will speak and the debt will be right; my God, let me go.'"

The Bishop's French was sometimes wonderfully and fearfully put together. But the girl saw the pictures. The imagery was familiar to her race and faith. She was weeping softly, with almost a little break of joy among the tears. For she saw the man, whom she had loved in spite of what he was, lifted now out of the weaknesses and sins of life. And her love leaped up quickly to the ideal and the illusions that every woman craves for and clings to.

"This," the Bishop was going on quietly, "is the new man we are to consider; the one who stands in the light and sees Truth. We must not hear the little mouthings of the world. Does he care for the opinions or the words that are said here? See, he stands in the great open space, all alone, and dares to look up to the Great God and tell Him all. Will you be afraid to stand in the court and tell these people, who do not matter at all?

"Remember, it is not for Jeffrey Whiting. It is not for the sake of Ruth Lansing. It is because the man you loved calls back to you, from where he has gone, to do the thing which the wisdom he has now learned tells him must be done. He has learned the lesson of eternal Truth. He would have you tell."

"Mon Pere, I will tell the tale," said the girl simply as she rose from her knees. "I will go quickly, while I have yet the courage."

The Bishop went with her to one of the counsel rooms in the courthouse and sent for Dardis.

"This girl," he told the lawyer, "has a story to tell. I think you would do wisely to put her on the stand and let her tell it in her own way. She will make no mistakes. They will not be able to break her down."

Then the Bishop went back to take up again his business with God.

As a last, and almost hopeless, resort, Jeffrey Whiting had been put upon the stand in his own defence. There was nothing he could tell which the jurors had not already heard in one form or another. Everybody had heard what he had said that morning on Bald Mountain. He had not been believed even then, by men who had never had a reason to doubt his simple word. There was little likelihood that he would be believed here now by these jurors, whose minds were already fixed by the facts and the half truths which they had been hearing. But there was some hope that his youth and the manly sincerity with which he clung to his simple story might have some effect. It might be that a single man on that jury would be so struck with his single sturdy tale that he would refuse to disbelieve it altogether. You could never tell what might strike a man on a jury. So Dardis argued.

Jeffrey Whiting did not care. If his counsel wished him to tell his story he would do so. It would not matter. His own friends did not believe his story. Nobody believed it. Two people knew that it was true. And those two people had stood up there upon the stand and sworn that they did not know. One of them was a good man, a man of God, a man he would have trusted with every dear thing that life held. That man had stood up there and lied. The other was a girl whom he loved, and who, he was sure, loved him.

It had not been easy for Ruth to tell that lie—or maybe she did not consider it a lie: he had seen her suffer terribly in the telling of it. He was beginning to feel that he did not care much what was the outcome of the trial. Life was a good thing, it was true. And death, or a life of death, as a murderer, was worse than twenty common deaths. But that had all dropped into the background. Only one big thing stood before him. It laid hold upon him and shook him and took from him his interest in every other fact in the world.

Ruth Lansing, he thought he could say, had never before in her life told a lie. Why should she have ever told a lie. She had never had reason to fear any one; and they only lie who fear. He would have said that the fear of death could not have made Ruth Lansing lie. Yet she had stood up there and lied.

For what? For a church. For a religion to which she had foolishly given herself. For that she had given up him. For that she had given up her conscience. For that she had given up her own truth!

It was unbelievable. But he had sat here and listened to it.

He had heard her lie simply and calmly in answer to a question which meant life or death to him. She had known that. She could not have escaped knowing it if she had tried. There was no way in which she could have fooled herself or been persuaded into believing that she was not lying or that she was not taking from him his last hope of life.

Jeffrey Whiting did not try to grapple or reason with the fact. What was the use? It was the end of all things. He merely sat and gazed dumbly at the monstrous thing that filled his whole mental vision.

He went forward to the witness chair and stood woodenly until some one told him to be seated. He answered the questions put him automatically, without looking either at the questioner or at the jury who held his fate in their hands. Men who had been watching the alert, keen-faced boy all day yesterday and through to-day wondered what had happened to him. Was he breaking down? Would he confess? Or had he merely ceased hoping and turned sullen and dumb?

Without any trace of emotion or interest, he told how he had raced forward, charging upon the man who was setting the fire. He looked vacantly at the Judge while the latter ordered that part of his words stricken out which told what the man was doing. He showed no resentment, no feeling of any kind. He related how the man had run away from him, trailing the torch through the brush, and again he did not seem to notice the Judge's anger in cautioning him not to mention the fire again.

At his counsel's direction, he went through a lifeless pantomime of falling upon one knee and pointing his rifle at the fleeing man. Now the man turned and faced him. Then he heard the shot which killed Rogers come from the woods. He dropped his own rifle and went forward to look at the dying man. He picked up the torch and threw it away.

Then he turned to fight the fire. (This time the Judge did not rule out the word.) Then his rifle had exploded in his hands, the bullet going just past his ear. The charge had scorched his neck. It was a simple story. The thing might have happened. It was entirely credible. There were no contradictions in it. But the manner of Jeffrey Whiting, telling it, gave no feeling of reality. It was not the manner of a man telling one of the most stirring things of his life. He was not telling what he saw and remembered and felt and was now living through. Rather, he seemed to be going over a wearying, many-times-told tale that he had rehearsed to tedium. A sleeping man might have told it so. The jury was left entirely unconvinced, though puzzled by the manner of the recital.

Even Lemuel Squires' harping cross questions did not rouse Jeffrey to any attention to the story that he had told. At each question he went back to the point indicated and repeated his recital dully and evenly without any thought of what the District Attorney was trying to make him say. He was not thinking of the District Attorney nor of the story. He was still gazing mentally in stupid wonder at the horrible fact that Ruth Lansing had lied his life away at the word of her church.

When he had gotten back to the little railed enclosure where he was again the prisoner, he sat down heavily to wait for the end of this wholly irrelevant business of the trial. Another witness was called. He did not know that there was another. He had expected that Squires would begin his speech at once.

He noticed that this witness was a girl from French Village whom he had seen several times. Now he remembered that she was Rafe Gadbeau's girl. What did they bring her here for? She could not know anything, and why did they want to pester the poor thing? Didn't the poor little thing look sorry and troubled enough without fetching her down here to bring it all up to her? He roused himself to look reassuringly at the girl, as though to tell her not to mind, that it did not matter anyway, that he knew she could not help him, and that she must not let them hurt her.

Dardis, to forestall objections and to ensure Cynthe against interruptions from the prosecutor or the Judge, had told her to say nothing about fire but to speak directly about the killing of Rogers and nothing else. So when, after she had been sworn, he told her to relate the things that led up to the killing, she began at the very beginning:

"Four years ago," she said, "Rafe Gadbeau was in Utica. A man was killed in a crowd. His knife had been used to kill the man. Rafe Gadbeau did not do that. Often he has sworn to me that he did not know who had done it. But a detective, a man named Rogers, found the knife and traced it to Rafe Gadbeau. He did not arrest him. No, he kept the knife, saying that some day he would call upon Rafe Gadbeau for the price of his silence.

"Last summer this man Rogers came into the woods looking for some one to help get the people to sell their land. He saw Rafe Gadbeau. He showed him the knife. He told him that whatever he laid upon him to do, that he must do. He made him lie to the people. He made him attack the young Whiting. He made him do many things that he would not do, for Rafe Gadbeau was not a bad man, only foolish sometimes. And Rafe Gadbeau was sore under the yoke of fear that this man had put upon him.

"At times he said to me, 'Cynthe, I will kill this man one day, and that will be the end of all.' But I said, 'Non, non, mon Rafe, we will marry in the fall, and go away to far Beaupre where he will never see you again, and we will not know that he ever lived.'"

Cynthe had forgotten her audience. She was telling over to herself the tragedy of her little life and her great love. Genius could not have told her how better to tell it for the purpose for which her story was here needed. Dardis thanked his stars that he had taken the Bishop's advice, to let her get through with it in her own way.

"But it was not time for us to marry yet," she went on. "Then came the morning of the nineteenth August. I was sitting on the back steps of my aunt's house by the Little Tupper, putting apples on a string to hang up in the hot sun to dry." The Judge turned impatiently on his bench and shrugged his shoulders. The girl saw and her eyes blazed angrily at him. Who was he to shrug his shoulders! Was it not important, this story of her love and her tragedy! Thereafter the Judge gave her the most rigid attention.

"Rafe Gadbeau came and sat down on the steps at my feet. I saw that he was troubled. 'What is it, mon Rafe?' I asked. He groaned and said one bad word. Then he told me that he had just had a message from Rogers to meet him at the head of the rail with three men and six horses. 'What to do, mon Rafe?' 'I do not know,' he said, 'though I can guess. But I will not tell you, Cynthe.'

"'You will not go, mon Rafe. Promise me you will not go. Hide away, and we will slip down to the Falls of St. Regis and be married—me, I do not care for the grand wedding in the church here—and then we will get away to Beaupre. Promise me.'

"'Bien, Cynthe, I promise. I will not go to him.'

"But it was a man's promise. I knew he would go in the end.

"I watched and followed. I did not know what I could do. But I followed, hoping that somewhere I could get Rafe before they had done what they intended and we could run away together with clean hands.

"When I saw that they had gone toward the railroad I turned aside and climbed up to the Bald Mountain. I knew they would all come back there together. I waited until it was dark and they came. They would do nothing in the night. I waited for the morning. Then I would find Rafe and bring him away. I was desperate. I was a wild girl that night. If I could have found that Rogers and come near him I would have killed him myself. I hated him, for he had made me much suffering.

"In the morning I was in the woods near them. I saw Rafe. But that Rogers kept him always near him.

"I saw Rogers go out of the wood a little to look. Rafe was a little way from him and coming slowly toward me. I called to him. He did not hear. I saw the look in his face. It was the look of one who has made up his mind to kill. Again I called to him. But he did not hear.

"I saw Rogers go running along the edge of the wood. Now he came running back toward Rafe. He stopped and turned.

"The young Whiting was on his knee with the rifle raised to shoot. I looked to Rafe. The sound of his gun struck me as I turned my face. The bullet struck Rogers in the back of the head. I saw. The young Whiting had not fired at all.

"I turned and ran, calling to Rafe to follow me. 'Come with me, mon Rafe,' I called. 'I, too, am guilty. I would have killed him in the night. Come with me. We will escape. The fire will cover all. None will ever know but you and me, and I am guilty as you. Come.'

"But he did not hear. And I wished him to hear. Oh! I wished him at least to hear me say that I took the share of the guilt, for I did not wish to be separated from him in this world or the next.

"But he ran back always into the path of the fire, for those other men, the old M'sieur Beasley and the others, were closing behind him and the fire."

She was speaking freely of the fire now, but it did not matter. Her story was told. The big, hot tears were flowing freely and her voice rose into a cry of farewell as she told the end.

"Then he was down and I saw the fire roll over him. Oh, the great God, who is good, was cruel that day! Again, at the last, I saw him up and running on again. Then the fire shut him out from my sight, and God took him away.

"That is all. I ran for the Little Tupper and was safe."

Dardis did not try to draw another word from her on any part of the story. He was artist enough to know that the story was complete in its naive and tragic simplicity. And he was judge enough of human nature to understand that the jury would remember better and hold more easily her own unthought, clipped expressions than they would any more connected elaborations he might try to make her give.

Lemuel Squires was a narrow man, a born prosecutor. He had always been a useful officer to the railroad powers because he was convinced of the guilt of any prisoner whom it was his business to bring into court. He regarded a verdict of acquittal as hardly less than a personal insult. He denied that there were ever two sides to any case. But his very narrowness now confounded him here. This girl's story was true. It was astounding, impossible, subversive of all things. But it was true.

His mind, one-sided as it was always, had room for only the one thing. The story was true. He asked her a few unimportant questions, leading nowhere, and let her go. Then he began his summing up to the jury.

It was a half-hearted, wholly futile plea to them to remember the facts by which the prisoner had already been convicted and to put aside the girl's dramatic story. He was still convinced that the prisoner was guilty. But—the girl's story was true. His mind was not nimble enough to escape the shock of that fact. He was helpless under it. His pleading was spiritless and wandering while his mind stood aside to grapple with that one astounding thing.

The Judge, however, in charging the jury was troubled by none of these hampering limitations of mind. He had always regarded the taking and discussion of evidence as a rather wearisome and windy business. All democracy was full of such wasteful and time-killing ways of coming to a conclusion. The boy was guilty. The powers who controlled the county had said he was guilty. Why spoil good time, then, quibbling.

He charged the jury that the girl's testimony was no more credible than that of a dozen other witnesses—which was quite true. All had told the truth as they understood it, and saw it. But he glided smoothly over the one important difference. The girl had seen the act. No other, not even the accused himself, had been able to say that.

He delivered an extemporaneous and daringly false lecture on the comparative force of evidence, intended only to befog the minds of the jurors. But the effect of it was exactly the opposite to that which he had intended, for, whereas they had up to now held a fairly clear view of the things that had been proven by the adroit handling of his facts by the District Attorney, they now forgot all that structure of guilt which he so laboriously built up and remembered only one thing clearly. And that thing was the story of Cynthe Cardinal.

Without leaving their seats, they intimated that they had come to an agreement.

The Judge, glowering dubiously at them, demanded to know what it was.

Jeffrey Whiting stood up.

The foreman rose and faced the Judge stubbornly, saying:

"Not guilty."

The Judge polled the jury, glaring fiercely at each man as his name was called, but one after another the men arose and answered gruffly for acquittal. The hill people rushed from the courthouse, running for their horses and shouting the verdict as they ran. Then sleepy little Danton awoke from its September drowse and was aware that something real had happened. The elaborate machinery of prosecution, the whole political power of the county, the mighty grip and pressure of the railroad power had all been set at nothing by the tragic little love story of an ignorant French girl from the hills.

Dardis led Jeffrey Whiting down from the place where he had been a prisoner and brought him to his mother.

Jeffrey turned a long searching gaze down into his mother's eyes as he stooped to kiss her. What he saw filled him with a bitterness that all the years of his life would not efface. What he saw was not the sprightly, cheery, capable woman who had been his mother, but a grey, trembling old woman, broken in body and heart, who clung to him fainting and crying weakly. What men had done to him, he could shake off. They had not hurt him. He could still defy them. But what they had done to his little mother, that would rankle and turn in his heart forever. He would never forgive them for the things they had done to her in these four weeks and in these two days.

And here at his elbow stood the one person who had to-day done more to hurt his mother and himself than any other in the world could have done. She could have told his mother weeks ago, and have saved her all that racking sorrow and anxiety. But no, for the sake of that religion of hers, for the sake of what some priest told her, she had stuck to what had turned out to be a useless lie, to save a dead man's name.

Ruth stood there reaching out her hands to him. But he turned upon her with a look of savage, fleering contempt; a look that stunned the girl as a blow in the face would have done. Then in a strange, hard voice he said brutally:

"You lied!"

Ruth dropped her eyes pitifully under the shock of his look and words. Even now she could not speak, could not appeal to his reason, could not tell him that she had heard nothing but what had come under the awful seal of the confessional. The secret was out. She had risked his life and lost his love to guard that secret, and now the world knew it. All the world could talk freely about what she had done except only herself. Even if she could have reached up and drawn his head down to her lips, even then she could not so much as whisper into his ear that he was right, or try to tell him why she had not been able to speak. She saw the secret standing forever between their two lives, unacknowledged, embittering both those lives, yet impassable as the line of death.

When she looked up, he was gone out to his freedom in the sunlight.

The hill people were jammed about the door and in the street as he came out. Twenty hands reached forward to grasp him, to draw him into the midst of their crowd, to mount him upon his own horse which they had caught wandering in the high hills and had brought down for him. They were happy, triumphant and loud, for them—the hill people were not much given to noise or demonstration. But under their triumph and their noise there was a current of haste and anxious eagerness which he was quick to notice.

During the weeks in jail, when his own fate had absorbed most of his waking moments, he had let slip from him the thought of the battle that yet must be waged in the hills. Now, among his people again, and once more their unquestioned leader, his mind went back with a click into the grooves in which it had been working so long. He pushed his horse forward and led the men at a gallop over the Racquette bridge and out toward the hills, the families who had come down from the nearer hills in wagons stringing along behind.

When they were well clear of the town, he halted and demanded the full news of the last four weeks.

It must not be forgotten that while this account of these happenings has been obliged to turn aside here and there, following the vicissitudes and doings of individuals, the railroad powers had never for a moment turned a step aside from the single, unemotional course upon which they had set out. Orders had gone out that the railroad must get title to the strip of hill country forty miles wide lying along the right of way. These orders must be executed. The titles must be gotten. Failures or successes here or there were of no account. The incidents made use of or the methods employed were of importance only as they contributed to the general result.

Jeffrey Whiting had blocked the plans once. That was nothing. There were other plans. The Shepherd of the North before the Senate committee had blocked another set of plans. That was merely an obstacle to be gone around. The railroad people had gone around it by procuring the burning of the country. The people, left homeless for the most part and well-nigh ruined, would be glad now to take anything they could get for their lands. There had been no vindictiveness, no animus on the part of the railroad. Its programme had been as impersonal and detached as the details in any business transaction. Certain aims were to be accomplished. The means were purely incidental.

Rogers, whom the railroad had first used as an agent and afterwards as an instrument, was now gone—a broken tool. Rafe Gadbeau, who had been Rogers' assistant, was gone—another broken tool. The fire had been used for its purpose. The fire was a thing of the past. Jeffrey Whiting had been put out of the way—definitely, the railroad had hoped. He was now free again to make difficulties. All these things were but changes and moves and temporary checks in the carrying through of the business. In the end the railroad must attain its end.

Jeffrey Whiting saw all these things as he sat his horse on the old Piercefield road and listened to what had been happening in the hills during the four weeks of his removal from the scene.

The fire, because it had seemed the end of all things to the people of the hills, had put out of their minds all thought of what the railroad would do next. Now they were realising that the railroad had moved right on about its purpose in the wake of the fire. It had learned instantly of Rogers' death and had instantly set to work to use that as a means of removing Jeffrey Whiting from its path. But that was only a side line of activity. It had gone right on with its main business. Other men had been sent at once into the hills with what seemed like liberal offers for six-month options on all the lands which the railroad coveted.

They had gotten hold of discouraged families who had not yet begun to rebuild. The offer of any little money was welcome to these. The whole people were disorganised and demoralised as a result of the scattering which the fire had forced upon them. They were not sure that it was worth while to rebuild in the hills. The fire had burned through the thin soil in many places so that the land would be useless for farming for many years to come. They had no leader, and the fact that Jeffrey Whiting was in jail charged with murder, and, as they heard, likely to be convicted, forced upon them the feeling that the railroad would win in the end. Where was the use to struggle against an enemy they could not see and who could not be hurt by anything they might do?

Jeffrey Whiting saw that the fight which had gone before, to keep the people in line and prevent them from signing enough options to suit the railroad's purpose, had been easy in comparison with the one that was now before him. The people were disheartened. They had begun to fear the mysterious, unassailable power of the railroad. It was an enemy of a kind to which their lives and training had not accustomed them. It struck in the dark, and no man's hand could be raised to punish. It hid itself behind an illusive veil of law and a bulwark of officials.

The people were for the large part still homeless. Many were still down in the villages, living upon neighbourhood kindness and the scant help of public charity. Only the comparative few who could obtain ready credit had been able even to begin rebuilding. If they were not roused to prodigious efforts at once, the winter would be upon them before the hills were resettled. And with the coming of the pinch of winter men would be ready to sell anything upon which they had a claim, for the mere privilege of living.

When they came up into the burnt country, the bitterness which had been boiling up in his heart through those weeks and which he had thought had risen to its full height during the scenes of to-day now ran over completely. His heart raved in an agony of impotent anger and a thirst for revenge. His life had been in danger. Gladly would he now put it ten times in danger for the power to strike one free, crushing blow at this insolent enemy. He would grapple with it, die with it only for the power to bring it to the ground with himself!

The others had become accustomed to the look of the country, but the full desolation of it broke upon his eyes now for the first time. The hills that should have glowed in their wonderful russets from the red sun going down in the west, were nothing but streaked ash heaps, where the rain had run down in gullies. The valleys between, where the autumn greens should have run deep and fresh, where snug homes should have stood, where happy people should now be living, were nothing but blackened hollows of destitution. From Bald Mountain, away up on the east, to far, low-lying Old Forge to the south, nothing but a circle of ashes. Ashes and bitterness in the mouth; dirt and ashes in the eye; misery and the food of hate in the heart!

Very late in the night they came to French Village. The people here were still practically living in the barrack which the Bishop had seen built, the women and children sleeping in it, the men finding what shelter they could in the new houses that were going up. There were enough of these latter to show that French Village would live again, for the notes which the Bishop had endorsed had carried credit and good faith to men who were judges of paper on which men's names were written and they had brought back supplies of all that was strictly needful.

Here was food and water for man and beast. Men roused themselves from sleep to cheer the young Whiting and to hobble the horses out and feed them. And shrill, voluminous women came forth to get food for the men and to wave hands and skillets wildly over the story of Cynthe Cardinal.

The mention of the girl's name brought things back to Jeffrey Whiting. Till now he had hardly given a thought to the girl who, by a terrible sacrifice of the man she loved, had saved him. He owed that girl a great deal. And the thought brought to his mind another girl. He struck himself viciously across the eyes as though he would crush the memory, and went out to tramp among the ashes till the dawn. His body had no need of rest, for the exercise he had taken to-day had merely served to throw off the lethargy of the jail; and sleep was beyond him.

At the first light he roused the hill men and told them what the night had told him. Unless they struck one desperate, destroying blow at the railroad, it would come up mile by mile and farm by farm and take from them the little that was left to them. They had been fools that they had not struck in the beginning when they had first found that they were being played falsely. If they had begun to fight in the early summer their homes would not have been burned and they would not be now facing the cold and hunger of an unsheltered, unprovided winter.

Why had they not struck? Because they were afraid? No. They had not struck because their fathers had taught them a fear and respect of the law. They had depended upon law. And here was law for them: the hills in ashes, their families scattered and going hungry!

If no man would go with him, he would ride alone down to the end of the rails and sell his life singly to drive back the work as far as he could, to rouse the hill people to fight for themselves and their own.

If ten men would come with him they could drive back the workmen for days, days in which the hill people would come rallying back into the hills to them. The people were giving up in despair because nothing was being done. Show them that even ten men were ready to fight for them and their rights and they would come trooping back, eager to fight and to hold their homes. There was yet wealth in the hills. If the railroad was willing to fight and to defy law and right to get it, were there not men in the hills who would fight for it because it was their own?

If fifty men would come with him they could destroy the railroad clear down below the line of the hills and put the work back for months. They would have sheriffs' posses out against them. They would have to fight with hired fighters that the railroad would bring up against them. In the end they would perhaps have to fight the State militia, but there were men among them, he shouted, who had fought more than militia. Would they not dare face it now for their homes and their people!

Some men would die. But some men always died, in every cause. And in the end the people of the whole State would judge the cause!

Would one man come? Would ten? Would fifty?

Seventy-two grim, sullen men looked over the knobs and valleys of ashes where their homes had been, took what food the French people could spare them, and mounted silently behind him.

Up over the ashes of Leyden road, past the cellars of the homes of many of them, for half the day they rode, saving every strain they could upon their horses. A three-hour rest. Then over the southern divide and down the slope they thundered to strike the railroad at Leavit's bridge.



IX

THE COMING OF THE SHEPHERD

The wires coming down from the north were flashing the railroad's call for help. A band of madmen had struck the end of the line at Leavit's Creek and had destroyed the half-finished bridge. They had raced down the line, driving the frightened labourers before them, tearing up the ties and making huge fires of them on which they threw the new rails, heating and twisting these beyond any hope of future usefulness.

Labourers, foremen and engineers of construction had fled literally for their lives. The men of the hills had no quarrel with them. They preferred not to injure them. But they were infuriated men with their wrongs fresh in mind and with deadly hunting rifles in hand. The workmen on the line needed no second warning. They would take no chances with an enemy of this kind. They were used to violence and rioting in their own labour troubles, but this was different. This was war. They threw themselves headlong upon handcars and work engines and bolted down the line, carrying panic before them.

In a single night the hill men with Jeffrey Whiting at their head had ridden down and destroyed nearly twenty miles of very costly construction work. There were yet thirty miles of the line left in the hills and if the men were not stopped they would not leave a single rail in all the hill country where they were masters.

The call of the railroad was at first frantic with panic and fright. That was while little men who had lost their wits were nominally in charge of a situation in which nobody knew what to do. Then suddenly the tone of the railroad's call changed. Big men, used to meeting all sorts of things quickly and efficiently, had taken hold. They had the telegraph lines of the State in their hands. There was no more frightened appeal. Orders were snapped over the wires to sheriffs in Adirondack and Tupper and Alexander counties. They were told to swear in as many deputies as they could lead. They were to forget the consideration of expense. The railroad would pay and feed the men. They were to think of nothing but to get the greatest possible number of fighting men upon the line at once.

Then a single great man, a man who sat in a great office building in New York and held his hand upon every activity in the State, saw the gravity of the business in the hills and put himself to work upon it. He took no half measures. He had no faith in little local authorities, who would be bound to sympathise somewhat with the hill people in this battle.

He called the Governor of the State from Albany to his office. He ordered the Governor to turn out the State's armed forces and set them in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W. Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and by whose permission. Also he pointed out that the permission of the great railroad system that covered the State would again be necessary in order that Governor Foster might succeed himself. Then the great man sent Wilbur Foster back to Albany to order out the nearest regiment of the National Guard for service in the hills.

Before the second night three companies of the militia had passed through Utica and had gone up the line of the U. & M. Their orders were to avoid killing where possible and to capture all of the hill men that they could. The railroad wished to have them tried and imprisoned by the impartial law of the land. For it was characteristic of the great power which in those days ruled the State that when it had outraged every sense of fair play and common humanity to attain its ends it was then ready to spend much money creating public opinion in favour of itself.

Jeffrey Whiting stood in the evening in the cover of the woods above Milton's Crossing and watched a train load of soldiers on flat cars come creeping up the grade from the south. This was the last of the hills. He had refused to let his men go farther. Behind him lay fifty miles of new railroad in ruins. Before him lay the open, settled country. His men, once the fever of destruction had begun to run in their blood, had wished to sweep on down into the villages and carry their work through them. But he had stood firm. This was their own country where they belonged and where the railroad was the interloper. Here they were at home. Here there was a certain measure of safety for them even in the destructive and lawless work that they had begun. They had done enough. They had pushed the railroad back to the edge of the hills. They had roused the men of the hills behind them. Where he had started with his seventy-two friends, there were now three hundred well-armed men in the woods around him. Here in their cover they could hold the line of the railroad indefinitely against almost any force that might be sent against them.

But the inevitable sobering sense of leadership and responsibility was already at work upon him. The burning, rankling anger that had driven him onward so that he had carried everything and everybody near him into this business of destruction was now dulled down to a slow, dull hate that while it had lost nothing of its bitterness yet gave him time to think. Those men coming up there on the cars were not professional soldiers, paid to fight wherever there was fighting to be done. Neither did they care anything for the railroad that they should come up here to fight for it. Why did they come?

They had joined their organisation for various reasons that usually had very little to do with fighting. They were clerks and office men, for the most part, from the villages and factories of the central part of the State. The militia companies had attracted them because the armouries in the towns had social advantages to offer, because uniforms and parade appeal to all boys, because they were sons of veterans and the military tradition was strong in them. Jeffrey Whiting's strong natural sense told him the substance of these things. He could not regard these boys as deadly enemies to be shot down without mercy or warning. They had taken their arms at a word of command and had come up here to uphold the arm of the State. If the railroad was able to control the politics of the State and so was able to send these boys up here on its own business, then other people were to blame for the situation. Certainly these boys, coming up here to do nothing but what their duty to the State compelled them to do; they were not to be blamed.

His men were now urging him to withdraw a little distance into the hills to where the bed of the road ran through a defile between two hills. The soldiers would no doubt advance directly up the line of what had been the railroad, covering the workmen and engineers who would be coming on behind them. If they were allowed to go on up into the defile without warning or opposition they could be shot down by the hill men from almost absolute safety. If he had been dealing with a hated enemy Jeffrey Whiting perhaps could have agreed to that. But to shoot down from ambush these boys, who had come up here many of them probably thinking they were coming to a sort of picnic or outing in the September woods, was a thing which he could not contemplate. Before he would attack them these boys must know just what they were to expect.

He saw them leave the cars at the end of the broken line and take up their march in a rough column of fours along the roadbed. He was surprised and puzzled. He had expected them to work along the line only as fast as the men repaired the rails behind them. He had not thought that they would go away from their cars.

Then he understood. They were not coming merely to protect the rebuilding of the railroad. They had their orders to come straight into the hills, to attack and capture him and his men. The railroad was not only able to call the State to protect itself. It had called upon the State to avenge its wrongs, to exterminate its enemies. His men had understood this better than he. Probably they were right. This thing might as well be fought out from the first. In the end there would be no quarter. They could defeat this handful of troops and drive them back out of the hills with an ease that would be almost ridiculous. But that would not be the end.

The State would send other men, unlimited numbers of them, for it must and would uphold the authority of its law. Jeffrey Whiting did not deceive himself. Probably he had not from the beginning had any doubt as to what would be the outcome of this raid upon the railroad. The railroad itself had broken the law of the State and the law of humanity. It had defied every principle of justice and common decency. It had burned the homes of law-supporting, good men in the hills. Yet the law had not raised a hand to punish it. But now when the railroad itself had suffered, the whole might of the State was ready to be set in motion to punish the men of the hills who had merely paid their debt.

But Jeffrey Whiting could not say to himself that he had not foreseen all this from the outset. Those days of thinking in jail had given him an insight into realities that years of growth and observation of things outside might not have produced in him. He had been given time to see that some things are insurmountable, that things may be wrong and unsound and utterly unjust and still persist and go on indefinitely. Youth does not readily admit this. Jeffrey Whiting had recognised it as a fact. And yet, knowing this, he had led these men, his friends, men who trusted him, upon this mad raid. They had come without the clear vision of the end which he now realised had been his from the start. They had thought that they could accomplish something, that they had some chance of winning a victory over the railroad. They had believed that the power of the State would intervene to settle the differences between them and their enemy. Jeffrey Whiting knew, must have known all along, that the moment a tie was torn up on the railroad the whole strength of the State would be put forth to capture these men and punish them. There would be no compromise. There would be no bargaining. If they surrendered and gave themselves up now they would be jailed for varying terms. If they did not, if they stayed here and fought, some of them would be killed and injured and in one way or another all would suffer in the end.

He had done them a cruel wrong. The truth of this struck him with startling clearness now. He had led them into this without letting them see the full extent of what they were doing, as he must have seen it.

There was but one thing to do. If they dispersed now and scattered themselves through the hills few of them would ever be identified. And if he went down and surrendered alone the railroad would be almost satisfied with punishing him. It was the one just and right thing to do.

He went swiftly among the men where they stood among the trees, waiting with poised rifles for the word to fire upon the advancing soldiers, and told them what they must do. He had deceived them. He had not told them the whole truth as he himself knew it. They must leave at once, scattering up among the hills and keeping close mouths as to where they had been and what they had done. He would go down and give himself up, for if the railroad people once had him in custody they would not bother so very much about bringing the others to punishment.

His men looked at him in a sort of puzzled wonder. They did not understand, unless it might be that he had suddenly gone crazy. There was an enemy marching up the line toward them, bent upon killing or capturing them. They turned from him and without a spoken word, without a signal of any sort, loosed a rifle volley across the front of the oncoming troops. The battle was on!

The volley had been fired by men who were accustomed to shoot deer and foxes from distances greater than this. The first two ranks of the soldiers fell as if they had been cut down with scythes. Not one of them was hit above the knees. The firing stopped suddenly as it had begun. The hill men had given a terse, emphatic warning. It was as though they had marked a dead line beyond which there must be no advance.

These soldiers had never before been shot at. The very restraint which the hill men had shown in not killing any of them in that volley proved to the soldiers even in their fright and surprise how deadly was the aim and the judgment of the invisible enemy somewhere in the woods there before them. To their credit, they did not drop their arms or run. They stood stunned and paralysed, as much by the suddenness with which the firing had ceased as by the surprise of its beginning.

Their officers ran forward, shouting the superfluous command for them to halt, and ordering them to carry the wounded men back to the cars. For a moment it seemed doubtful whether they would again advance or would put themselves into some kind of defence formation and hold the ground on which they stood.

Jeffrey Whiting, looking beyond them, saw two other trains come slowly creeping up the line. From the second train he saw men leaping down who did not take up any sort of military formation. These he knew were sheriffs' posses, fighting men sworn in because they were known to be fighters. They were natural man hunters who delighted in the chase of the human animal. He had often seen them in the hills on the hunt, and he knew that they were an enemy of a character far different from those harmless boys who could not hit a mark smaller than the side of a hill. These men would follow doggedly, persistently into the highest of the hills, saving themselves, but never letting the prey slip from their sight, dividing the hill men, separating them, cornering them until they should have tracked them down one by one and either captured or killed them all.

These men did not attempt to advance along the line of the road. They stepped quickly out into the undergrowth and began spreading a thin line of men to either side.

Then he saw that the third train, although they were soldiers, took their lesson from the men who had just preceded them. They left the tracks and spreading still farther out took up the wings of a long line that was now stretching east to west along the fringe of the hills. The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther. It was perfect and systematic work, he agreed, that could not have been better done if he and his companions had planned it for their own capture.

There were easily eight hundred men there in front, he judged; men well armed and ready for an indefinite stay in the hills, with a railroad at their back to bring up supplies, and with the entire State behind them. And the State was ready to send more and more men after these if it should be necessary. He had no doubt that hundreds of other men were being held in readiness to follow these or were perhaps already on their way. He saw the end.

Those lines would sweep up slowly, remorselessly and surround his men. If they stood together they would be massacred. If they separated they would be hunted down one by one.

Their only chance was to scatter at once and ride back to where their homes had been. This time he implored them to take their chance, begged them to save themselves while they could. But he might have known that they would do nothing of the kind. Already they were breaking away and spreading out to meet that distending line in front of them. Nothing short of a miracle could now save them from annihilation, and Jeffrey Whiting was not expecting a miracle. There was nothing to be done but to take command and sell his life along with theirs as dearly as possible.

* * * * *

The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men who had followed the course of things through the past months, men who knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess. There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed themselves.

The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad. Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State, went back again to their business.

The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow to anger; but, once past a certain point of aggravation, absolutely heedless and reckless of consequences.

He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the people and only for the people.

He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the gathering of the forces of the State to punish.

Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no moment now.

One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W. Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set all these things going, whose ruthless hand was to be recognised in every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the hills.

Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was an act which had revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to those heights.

After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?

Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the office of Clifford Stanton.

Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had chiselled the Bishop's face into a single, simple expression of will power was not to be found in the other's face. In its stead there was a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man behind the face had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.

Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one of the strongest willed men that he had ever met, and that he must test out the other man to the depths and be himself tried out to the limit of his strength.

"It is some years since I've seen you, Bishop. But we are both busy men. And—well— You know I am glad to have you come to see me. I need not tell you that."

The Bishop accepted the other man's frank courtesy and took a chair quietly. Stanton watched him carefully. The Bishop was showing the last few years a good deal, he thought. In reality it was the last month that the Bishop was showing. But it did not show in the steady, untroubled glow of his eyes. The Bishop wasted no time on preliminaries.

"I have come on business, of course, Mr. Stanton," he began. "It is a very strange and unusual business. And to come at it rightly I must tell you a story. At the end of the story I will ask you a question. That will be my whole business."

The other man said nothing. He did not understand and he never spoke until he was sure that he understood. The Bishop plunged into his story.

"One January day in 'Sixty-five' I was going up the Shenandoah alone. My command had left me behind for two days of hospital service at Cross Keys. They were probably some twenty miles ahead of me and would be crossing over the divide towards Five Forks and the east. I thought I knew a way by which I could cut off a good part of the distance that separated me from them, so I started across the Ridge by a path which would have been impossible for troops in order.

"I was right. I did cut off the distance which I had expected and came down in the early afternoon upon a good road that ran up the eastern side of the Ridge. I was just congratulating myself that I would be with my men before dark, when a troop of Confederate cavalry came pelting over a rise in the road behind me.

"I leaped my horse back into the brush at the side of the road and waited. They would sweep on past and allow me to go on my way. Behind them came a troop of our own horse pursuing hotly. The Confederate horses were well spent. I saw that the end of the pursuit was not far off. The Confederates—some detached band of Early's men, I imagine—realised that they would soon be run down. Just where I had left the road there was a sharp turn. Here the Confederates threw themselves from their horses and drew themselves across the road. They were in perfect ambush, for they could be seen scarcely fifteen yards back on the narrow road.

"I broke from the bush and fled back along the road to warn our men. But I did no good. They were beyond all stopping, or hearing even, as they came yelling around the turn of the road.

"For three minutes there was some of the sharpest fighting I ever saw, there in the narrow road, before what remained of the Confederates broke after their horses and made off again. In the very middle of the fight I noticed two young officers. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant. I knew them. I knew their story. I believe I was the only man living who knew that story. Probably I did not know the whole of that story.

"The lieutenant had maligned the captain. He had said of him the one thing that a soldier may not say of another. They had fought once. Why they had been kept in the same command I do not know.

"Now in the very hottest of this fight, without apparently the slightest warning, the lieutenant threw himself upon the captain, attacking him viciously with his sword. For a moment they struggled there, unnoticed in the dust of the conflict. Then the captain, swinging free, struck the lieutenant's sword from his hand. The latter drew his pistol and fired, point blank. It missed. By what miracle I do not know. All this time the captain had held his sword poised to lunge, within easy striking distance of the other's throat. But he had made no attempt to thrust. As the pistol missed I saw him stiffen his arm to strike. Instead he looked a long moment into the lieutenant's eyes. The latter was screaming what were evidently taunts into his face. The captain dropped his arm, wheeled, and plunged at the now breaking line of Confederates.