t a night._"

In the early dawn, a local company of State troops, called out by the
governor, had the jail safe.

It was a gruesome sight in front of the stone wall where the deadly
fire from Jack Bracken's pistols had swept. Thirteen dead men lay,
and the back-bone of lynching had been broken forever in Alabama.

It was the governor himself, bluff and rugged, who grasped Jack
Bracken's hand as he lay dying, wrapped up, on a bale of cotton, and
Margaret Adams, pale, weeping beside him: "Live for me, Jack--I love
you. I have always loved you!"

"And for me, Jack," said the old governor, touched at the scene--"for
the state, to teach mobs how to respect the law. In the glory of what
you've done, I pardon you for all the past."

"It is fitten," said Jack, simply; "fitten that I should die for the
law--I who have been so lawless."

He turned to Margaret Adams: "You are lookin' somethin' you want to
say--I can tell by yo' eyes."

She faltered, then slowly: "Jack, he was not my son--my poor
sister--I could not see her die disgraced."

Jack drew her down and kissed her.

And as his eyes grew dim, a figure, tall and in military clothes,
stood before him, shaken with grief and saying, "Jack--Jack, my poor
friend--"

Jack's mind was wandering, but a great smile lit up his face as he
said: "_Bishop--Bishop--is--is--it Cap'n Tom, or--or--Jesus Christ?_"
And so he passed out.

And up above them all in the belfry, lying prone, but still gripping
his rifle's stock which, sweeping the jail with its deadly protruding
barrel, had held back hundreds of men, they found Richard Travis, a
softened smile on his lips as if he had just entered into the glory
of the great Sweet Silence of Things. And by him sat the old
preacher, where he had sat since Richard Travis's last shot had saved
the jail and the defenders; sat and bound up his wound and gave him
the last of his old whiskey out of the little flask, and stopped the
flow of blood and saved the life which had nearly bubbled out.

And as they brought the desperately wounded man down to the surgeon
and to life, the old governor raised his hat and said: "The Travis
blood--the Irish Gray--when it's wrong it is hell--when it's right it
is heaven."

But the old preacher smiled as he helped carry him tenderly down and
said: "He is right, forever right, now, Gov'nor. God has made him so.
See that smile on his lips! He has laughed before--that was from the
body. He is smiling now--