ll those people hovering about those lights below done
harm to him? He thought there were a few--and they were women--who would
not have followed his tumbril to his death with cries of execration.
The rest would have done so,--most of them did so, not because he was a
criminal, but because he was a victim, and because human nature as it is
thirsts inordinately at times for blood and sacrifice--a living strain
of the old barbaric instinct. He remembered that most of these people
were concerned in having injured The Man. The few good women there had
vile husbands; the few pardonable men had hateful wives: the village of
Purple Hill was an ill affair.

He thought: now doubtfully, now savagely, now with irony.

The hammer and steel clicked on.

He looked at the lights of the village again. Suddenly there came to
his mind the words of a great man who sought to save a city manifold
centuries ago. He was not sure that he wished to save this village; but
there was a grim, almost grotesque, fitness in the thing that he now
intended. He spoke out clearly through the night:

"'Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once:
Peradventure ten righteous shall be found there.'"

The hammer stopped. There was a silence, in which the pines sighed
lightly. Then, as if speaking was a labour, The Man replied in a deep,
harsh voice:

"I will not spare it for ten's sake."

Again there was a silence, in which Pierre felt his maimed body bend
beneath him; but presently the voice said,--"Now!"

At this the moon swung from behind a cloud. The Man stood behind The
Stone. His arm was raised to it. There was a moment's pause--it seemed
like years to Pierre; a wind came softly crying out of the west, the
moon hurried into the dark, and then a monster sprang from its pedestal
upon Purple Hill, and, with a sound of thunder and an awful speed, raced
upon the village below. The boulders of the hillside crumbled after it.

And Pierre saw the lights go out.

The moon shone out again for an instant, and Pierre saw that The Man
stood where The Stone had been; but when he reached the place The Man
was gone. Forever!

THE TALL MASTER

The story has been so much tossed about in the mouths of Indians, and
half-breeds, and men of the Hudson's Bay Company, that you are pretty
sure to hear only an apocryphal version of the thing as you now travel
in the North. But Pretty Pierre was at Fort Luke when the battle
occurred, and,