ecting back the light from the bonfires
and torches in front--lighting up a face which now seemed to have
lost all of its kindly humor in the crisis that was there. He was
unarmed, but he stood calm and with a courage that was more of sorrow
than of anger.

By him stood the village blacksmith, a man with the wild light of an
old, untamed joy gleaming in his eyes--a cruel, dangerous light--the
eyes of a caged tiger turned loose at last, and yearning for the
blood of the thing which had caged him.

And by him in quiet bravery, commanding, directing, stood the tall
figure of the Captain of Artillery.

When Richard Travis saw him, a cruel smile deepened in his eyes. "I
am dying myself," it said--"why not kill him?"

Then he shuddered with the hatred of the terrible thing that had come
into his heart--the thing that made him do its bidding, as if he
were a puppet, and overthrew all the good he had gathered there, that
terrible night, as the angels were driven from Paradise. And yet, how
it ruled him, how it drove him on!

"Jim--Jim," he whispered as he bent over his horse's neck--"Jim--my
repeating rifle over the library door--quick--it carries true and far!"

As Jim sped away his master was silent again. He thought of the nobility
of the things he had done that night--the touch of God that had come
over him in making him save Helen--the beautiful dreams he had had. He
thought of it all--and then--here--now--murdering the man whose life
carried with it the life, the love of--

He looked up at the stars, and the old wonder and doubt came back to
him--the old doubt which made him say to himself: "It is nothing--it is
the end. Dust thou art, and unto dust--dust--dust--dust--" he bit his
tongue to keep from saying it again--"Dust--to be blown away and mingle
with the elements--dust! And yet, I stand here--now--blood--flesh--a
thinking man--tempted--terribly--cruelly--poignantly--dying--of a poison
in my veins--of sorrow in my heart--sorrow and death. Who would not take
the dust--gladly take it--the dust and the--forgetting."

He remembered and repeated:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar--"

"'And cometh from afar,'" he whispered--"My God--suppose it does--and
that I am mistaken in it all?--Dust--and then maybe something after
dust."

With his rifle in his hand, it all vanished and he bega