nd scattered brick dust and mortar over
him. Torches gleamed through the dark crowd as stars amid fast flying
clouds in a March night. But through it all every man of them heard
the ringing warning words:

"Stop at the gateway--stop at the dead line!"

Right at it they rushed and crowded into it like cattle--shooting,
cursing, throwing stones.

Then two fell dead, blocking the gateway. Two more, wounded, with
screams of pain which threw the others into that indescribable panic
which comes to all mobs in the death-pinch, staggered back carrying
the mob with them.

Safe from the bullets, they became frenzied.

The town trembled with their fury.

All order was at an end.

And Edward Conway stood, behind a row of cotton bales, in the
jail-yard, covering still the little gateway, and the biting pain in
his shoulder had a companion pain in his side, where a pistol ball
had ploughed through, but he forgot it as he slipped fresh cartridges
into the chambers of his pistol and heard again the chant which came
from out the jail window, like a ghost-voice from the clouds:

"Of that City, to which I journey,
My Redeemer, my Redeemer is the light.
There is no sorrow, nor any sighing,
Nor any tears there, nor any dying...,
I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry--I can tarry but a night."

At a long distance they shot at Conway,--they hooted, jeered, cursed
him, but dared not come closer, for he had breast-worked himself
behind some cotton-bales in the yard, and they knew he could still
shoot.

Then they decided to batter down the stone wall first--to make an
opening they could rush through, and not be blocked in the deadly
gateway.

An hour passed, and torches gleamed everywhere. Attacking the wall
farther down, they soon had it torn away. They could now get to him.
It was a perilous position, and Conway knew it. Help--he must have
it--help to protect his flank while he shot in front. If not, he
would die soon, and the law with him.

He looked around him--but there was no solution. Then he felt that
death was near, for the mob now hated him more than they did the
prisoner. They seemed to have forgotten her, for all their cry now
was:

"_Kill Conway! Kill the man who murdered our people!_"

In ten minutes they were ready to attack again, but looking up they
saw a strange sight.

Help had come to Conway. On one side of him stood the old Cottontown
preacher, his white hair refl