ame here to try and fix things again--and I've brought HIM."

In the wondering silence that ensued the others smiled vacantly,
breathlessly, and expectantly, until Corbin advanced and held out his
hand, when Julia Jeffcourt, drawing hers back to her bosom with the
palms outward, uttered an inarticulate cry and--and spat in his face!

With that act she found tongue--reviling him, the house that harbored
him, the insolence that presented him, the insult that had been put upon
her! "Are you men!" she added passionately, "who stand here with the
man before you that killed my brother, and see him offer me his filthy
villainous hand--and dare not strike him down!"

And they dared not. Violently, blindly, stupidly moved though all their
instincts, though they gathered hysterically around him, there was
something in his dull self-containment that was unassailable and awful.
For he wiped his face and breast with his handkerchief without a tremor,
and turned to them with even a suggestion of relief.

"She's right, gentlemen," he said gravely. "She's right. It might have
been otherwise. I might have allowed that it might be otherwise,--but
she's right. I'm a Soth'n man myself, gentlemen, and I reckon to
understand what she has done. I killed the only man that had a right to
stand up for her, and she has now to stand up for herself. But if she
wants--and you see she allows she wants--to pass that on to some of you,
or all of you, I'm willing. As many as you like, and in what way
you like--I waive any chyce of weapon--I'm ready, gentlemen. I came
here--with HIM--for that purpose."

Perhaps it may have been his fateful resignation; perhaps it may have
been his exceeding readiness,--but there was no response. He sat down
again, and again swung his hat slowly and gloomily to and fro under his
chair.

"I've got him in a box at the stage office," he went on, apparently to
the carpet. "I had him dug up that I might bring him here, and mebbe
bury some of the trouble and difference along with his friends. It
might be," he added, with a slightly glowering upward glance, as to an
overruling, but occasionally misdirecting Providence,--"it might be
from the way things are piling up on me that some one might have rung in
another corpse instead o' HIM, but so far as I can judge, allowin' for
the space of time and nat'ral wear and tear--it's HIM!"

He rose slowly and moved towards the door in a silence that was as much
the result of some co