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For with it, too, drooped and faded the fortunes of the Bar. Madison Wayne sold out his claim, endowed the church at the Cross Roads with the proceeds, and the pulpit with his grim, hopeless, denunciatory presence. The first rains brought a freshet to the Bar. The river leaped the light barriers that had taken the place of Wayne’s peaceful engines, and regained the old channel. The curse that the Rev. Madison Wayne had launched on this riverside Sodom seemed to have been fulfilled. But even this brought no satisfaction to the gloomy prophet, for it was presently known that he had abandoned his terror-stricken flock to take the circuit as revivalist preacher and camp-meeting exhorter, in the rudest and most lawless of gatherings. Desperate ruffians writhed at his feet in impotent terror or more impotent rage; murderers and thieves listened to him with blanched faces and set teeth, restrained only by a more awful fear. Over and over again he took his life with his Bible into his own hands when he rose above the excited multitude; he was shot at, he was rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweeping over the country, carrying fear and frenzy with him, scouting life and mercy, and crushing alike the guilty and innocent, he came one Sabbath to a rocky crest of the Sierras–the last tattered and frayed and soiled fringe of civilization on the opened tract of a great highway. And here he was to “testify,” as was his wont.

But not as he expected. For as he stood up on a boulder above the thirty or forty men sitting or lying upon other rocks and boulders around him, on the craggy mountain shelf where they had gathered, a man also rose, elbowed past them, and with a hurried impulse tried to descend the declivity. But a cry was suddenly heard from others, quick and clamoring, which called the whole assembly to its feet, and it was seen that the fugitive had in some blundering way fallen from the precipice.

He was brought up cruelly maimed and mangled, his ribs crushed, and one lung perforated, but still breathing and conscious. He had asked to see the preacher. Death impending, and even then struggling with his breath, made this request imperative. Madison Wayne stopped the service, and stalked grimly and inflexibly to where the dying man lay. But there he started.

“McGee!” he said breathlessly.

“Send these men away,” said McGee faintly. “I’ve got suthin’ to tell you.”

The men drew back without a word. “You thought I was dead,” said McGee, with eyes still undimmed and marvelously clear. “I orter bin, but it don’t need no doctor to say it ain’t far off now. I left the Bar to get killed; I tried to in a row, but the fellows were skeert to close with me, thinkin’ I’d shoot. My reputation was agin me, there! You follow me? You understand what I mean?”

Kneeling beside him now and grasping both his hands, the changed and horror-stricken Wayne gasped, “But”–

“Hold on! I jumped off the Sacramento boat–I was goin’ down the third time–they thought on the boat I was gone–they think so now! But a passin’ fisherman dived for me. I grappled him–he was clear grit and would have gone down with me, but I couldn’t let him die too–havin’ so to speak no cause. You follow me–you understand me? I let him save me. But it was all the same, for when I got to ‘Frisco I read as how I was drowned. And then I reckoned it was all right, and I wandered HERE, where I wasn’t known–until I saw you.”

“But why should you want to die?” said Wayne, almost fiercely. “What right have you to die while others–double-dyed and blood-stained, are condemned to live, ‘testify,’ and suffer?”

The dying man feebly waved a deprecation with his maimed hand, and even smiled faintly. “I knew you’d say that. I knew what you’d think about it, but it’s all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin’ her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin’ YOU suffer and breakin’ HER heart–for all she tried to be gentle and gay.”

“Great God in heaven! Will you stop!” said Wayne, springing to his feet in agony. A frightened look–the first that any one had ever seen in the clear eyes of the Bell-ringer of Angel’s–passed over them, and he murmured tremulously: “All right–I’m stoppin’!”

So, too, was his heart, for the wonderful eyes were now slowly glazing. Yet he rallied once more–coming up again the third time as it seemed to Wayne–and his lips moved slowly. The preacher threw himself despairingly on the ground beside him.

“Speak, brother! For God’s sake, speak!”

It was his last whisper–so faint it might have been the first of his freed soul. But he only said:–

“You’re–followin’–me? You–understand–what–I–mean?”