ted in
prayer, the spirit for whom it was offered had risen with it, as it
were, still lovingly hand in hand, from the earth forever.

The funeral was arranged for two days later, and Gideon found that his
services had been so seriously yet so humbly counted upon by the
friends of the dead man that he could scarce find it in his heart to
tell them that it was the function of the local preacher--an older and
more experienced man than himself. "If it is," said Jack Hamlin,
coolly, "I'm afraid he won't get a yaller dog to come to his church;
but if you say you'll preach at the grave, there ain't a man, woman, or
child that will be kept away. Don't you go back on your luck, now;
it's something awful and nigger-like. You've got this crowd where the
hair is short; excuse me, but it's so. Talk of revivals! You could
give that one-horse show in Tasajara a hundred points, and skunk them
easily." Indeed, had Gideon been accessible to vanity, the spontaneous
homage he met with everywhere would have touched him more
sympathetically and kindly than it did; but in the utter
unconsciousness of his own power and the quality they worshiped in him,
he felt alarmed and impatient of what he believed to be their weak
sympathy with his own human weakness. In the depth of his unselfish
heart, lit, it must be confessed, only by the scant, inefficient lamp
of his youthful experience, he really believed he had failed in his
apostolic mission because he had been unable to touch the hearts of the
Vigilantes by oral appeal and argument. Feeling thus the reverence of
these irreligious people that surrounded him, the facile yielding of
their habits and prejudices to his half-uttered wish, appeared to him
only a temptation of the flesh. No one had sought him after the manner
of the camp-meeting; he had converted the wounded man through a common
weakness of their humanity. More than that, he was conscious of a
growing fascination for the truthfulness and sincerity of that class;
particularly of Mr. Jack Hamlin, whose conversion he felt he could
never attempt, yet whose strange friendship alternately thrilled and
frightened him.

It was the evening before the funeral. The coffin, half smothered in
wreaths and flowers, stood upon trestles in the anteroom; a large
silver plate bearing an inscription on which for the second time Gideon
read the name of the man he had converted. It was a name associated on
the frontier so often with reckless ha