.

Richard Travis thrust his rifle barrel through the air hole and aimed
carefully. The torches they carried made it all so plain and so easy.

Then two long, spiteful flashes of flame leaped out of the belfry
tower and the arm of the first incendiary, shot through and
through--holding his blazing torch, leaped like a rabbit in a sack,
and the torch went down and out. The torch of the second one was shot
out of its bearer's hand.

Panic-stricken, they looked up, saw, and fled. Those in front also
saw and bombarded the belfry with shot and pistol ball. And then, on
their side of the belfry, the same downward, spiteful flashes leaped
out, and two men, shot through the shoulder and the arm, cried out in
dismay, and they all fell back, stampeded, at the deadliness of the
spiteful thing in the tower, the gun that carried so true and so
far--so much farther than their own cheap guns.

They rushed out of its range, gathered in knots and cursed and
wondered who it was. But they dared not come nearer. Travis lay
still. He could not speak now, for the blood choked him when he
opened his mouth, and the stars which had once been above him now
wheeled and floated below, and around him. And that Sweeter Thing
that had been behind the stars now seemed to surround him as a halo,
a halo of silence which seemed to fit the silence of his own soul and
become part of him forever. It was all around him, as he had often
seen it around the summer moon; only now he felt it where he only
saw it before. And now, too, it was in his heart and filled it with a
sweet sadness, a sadness that hurt, it was so sweet, and which came
with an odor, the smell of the warm rain falling on the dust of a
summer of long ago.

And all his life passed before him--he lived it again--even more than
he had remembered before--even the memory of his mother whom he never
knew; but now he knew her and he reached up his arms--for he was in a
cradle and she bent over him--he reached up his arms and said: "_Oh,
mother, now I know what eternity is--it's remembering before and
after!_"

Visions, too--and Alice Westmore--Alice, pitying and smiling
approval--smiling,--and then a burning passionate kiss, and when he
would kiss again it was Helen's lips he met.

And through it all the great uplifting joy, and something which made
him try to shout and say: "The atonement--the atonement--"

Clear now and things around him seemed miles away.

He knew he was sinking and he