' wives, and
who writes on the balance-sheet: "Vengeance is mine. I will repay."

Some people, one of them an officer, entered the house from the opposite
side, and the two travelers, seeing no need for their services, turned
away and mounted their horses.

Mr. Allison was somewhat excited.

"Hanging is too good for that brute!" he said, loudly. "I believe I
could stand by and see him roast. Heavens, what a devil! Poor woman, I
wish I had not stopped there to-night."

Sammie grunted. "Thinking of the place she referred to as the
respectable dealer's future headquarters?" he questioned.

"Shut up, will you! This is no time for joking!"

The young man complied with the request of his polite friend, and
thought to himself, but Mr. Allison was no better pleased. He knew that
if he had not seen it, it would have been. It really was. He was deeply
stirred. And as he rode on through the night he was thinking new and
strange thoughts.

CHAPTER X.

"THE SIN BURDEN."

After Gilbert Allison arrived home from that ride, the ghostly night on
which he saw the fruits of a sinful traffic in all its horror, he
hastily disrobed and turned into bed, hoping to sleep away the
unpleasant thoughts and pictures that had possession of his mind; but no
sooner had sleep overtaken him than a face, framed in a halo of
red-brown hair, looked down upon him from an eminence; a white hand with
a phosphorescent glow pointed at him, while a voice kept repeating, to
the accompaniment of a childish wail, "Man--atom of the great iniquity,
man--atom of the great iniquity."

In his dream he did not recognize the face nor voice, and yet both
seemed strangely familiar to him.

When daylight came, the face and the white hand and the moaning child
went away and the face of the woman whose misery he had looked upon
haunted him, and her bitter prayer came to him in snatches.

The experience was distressing in no small degree to the ease-loving
man. He could not analyze his feelings and was not aware that what one
strange little woman called a "sin burden" had fallen with its weight
upon him. He was in the act of rubbing his eyes before his moral
resurrection.

* * * * *

Damon Crowley was behind the bars for the last time. Perhaps he did not
know, at any rate he did not care. He had reached the beginning of the
end.

From the corners of his cell dark faces leered at him; cruel, sharp
claws closed around hi