Presently he heard the hurried trampling of horses and men without.

"Rupe Watson!" said a loud voice.

"Hello!" answered Briggs.

"Go to —,” answered Briggs, imitating as nearly as he could guess the voice and the probable language (under the circumstances) of the absent Rupert.

There was a pause.

"They must be three miles off by now," said Briggs to himself. "If I can hold out for half an hour they're safe."

Then came half a dozen shots, all at the lock of the door. To which he answered by jamming a heavy timber against it from within.

"Come out!" said the voice once more.

But he only repeated his former reply, with the addition, "I ain't the kind of man to come without a proper invitation."

In proof of which, hearing men working at one corner of the building, he produced a revolver; and, pushing aside the window barricade for an instant, fired several shots at random.

"Now it's goin' to warm up," he said recklessly. "I wish I knew them two was safe."

But there were too many cracks and crannies in the rude cabin walls. There was a good deal of aimless shooting outside, to which he replied as well as he could from the window, which he had cunningly barricaded so as to be able to fire out, while no one could fire in. But while he was thus occupied the nozzle of a revolver was worked through a cranny, and a volley of haphazard shots were fired, one of which took effect, for he staggered and fell.

"Now it's all up,” he groaned; "I reckon I'm invited this time. Come in! Don't stand out there in the cold a-knockin'."

Put when they broke in upon him he raised himself on his elbow. "Who the devil are you?" exclaimed the leader of the gang in

amazement.

"Clement L. Briggs, I reckon," he answered, and fell back.

Several of the men withdrew a pace or two, and talked together.

"I say, boys," said one, "we've made a pretty mess of things. That's who it is; and we shall have to hush it up. But how in thunder did he come out here?"

Another of the party was kneeling beside the prostrate man, and looking intently into his face.

VOL. CCLXXII. NO. 1933.

"Briggs be hanged!" he said. "Clem Latham is more like it. Why, bless you, you ain't altered a bit from what you was before your wife Ellen died. I 'ud swear to you against a thousand."

"Who are you?" whispered Clem.

The other put some whisky to his lips. "Here, drink this-I'll And you don't recollect your old partner way back Well, well! But p'r'aps I've altered some all

stand by you.

on the lagoon?

these years."

But Latham had fainted.

66

A man rode up and came in. "Rupe Watson's got away," he said to the chief; went out through the Neck. But his wife was with him, and she's got thrown. Badly hurt, I fancy. They've taken her down to the town."

V.

The room wherein Clem lay was void of all superfluous furniture. A candle, stuck in the neck of a Budweiser bottle, threw a weirdly soft light across the bed and fought the moonlight that struggled through the dim window; a broken-seated chair, placed at arm's length from the sick man, held a cup of water.

He reached out a thin arm, took the cup, and drank feverishly; then lay back again; there was no one in the room. He was evidently expecting someone, and he listened intently for a footstep.

Before any sound was audible his face brightened, and making an effort to sit up, he watched the door with glistening eyes. Presently light footsteps resounded on the stairs.

The door was open, but a woman knocked and then came in. She was very thin and pale, and had one arm heavily bandaged. She had known that he was very ill; but she was not prepared for what She had much ado to choke back a convulsive sob.

she saw.

"'Most too late, Dorethy," he said; "most too late." She took his hand and kissed it.

"It was the hospital people," she said. "They would not let me out, though I prayed them to. And you have no one to wait upon you, and I was kept in there!"

The sob came this time, and she could not control it. But her eyes were dry-her heart was breaking.

"That's it," returned the sick man soothingly. "I told 'em I was better, and wanted to be alone and quiet. I 'lowed you 'ud come."

The woman could neither speak nor cry.

For a long time neither spoke. Clem stirred uneasily upon his rough couch, but yet seemed to be in no particular pain. For the first time he turned his eyes steadfastly upon his companion, and spoke in the old frontier accent of the days before his prosperity.

"Thar's some things," he said very slowly, "ez is to be jest so, and some things ez ain't. "Tain't no kinder use ter be sot back.

Don't you never wish to be sot back."

Dorothy did not understand.

"I hain't never bin as mought be said religious," he continued, and his speech began to wander, "but lately I've thought a pile, and things ez has puzzled me, man and boy, in luck and out, is a-getting clearer." For a moment he seemed to think, and then

went on, as one who had at last solved a knotty problem.

"Yes," he said, "thet's it; and it's plain as a circus placardeasy as a hot bath."

"Dorethy! Dorethy!"

"Yes," she answered softly, taking his hand, for he seemed blind; "I am here."

"Dorethy"-his tone would have conveyed that he was about to expound some great discovered truth-"mind, conscience, mem'ry, and soul is all one; and the greatest of 'em's mem'ry. Thet's what we'll be judged by. Everything we've ever done, good or bad, is wrote down there, for or ageħ us. Thet's the soul, as goes back when we ain't able to hold it any longer Lord! girl, mine's a-wandering; and there's a thing or two up agen me in it as ain't wiped out.

"I've loved ye all along, Dorethy," he continued abruptly, "and I 'lowed to tell ye... but thar was somethin' agen it from the start. Thar was somethin' agen it."

He closed his eyes, and for a long time did not speak. He looked tired.

Presently the woman, thinking that he had fallen asleep, stooped down and kissed him, timidly, shyly. It was the first time in all the years that she had loved him.

His eyes opened.

"Lowed I 'ud tell ye," he repeated drowsily. "I've loved ye all along. . . . 'Lowed to tell ye . . . afore I faced the music."

His words seemed to stun her. It was a long time before she moved. Then at last sweet tears from heaven came raining down her cheeks.

Her hand was still locked in his. She knelt down beside the

bed, and with a great sob pillowed her head within his arm, upon the shoulder. And in that sob her tears were changed to drops of blood.

A pack-rat, tempted by the stillness, came down from the roof, jumped upon the bed, and looked inquiringly at them. His eye was suddenly caught by the ring upon the woman's finger. Cautiously working round the hand, and smelling at it, he ventured to try the metal with his teeth; then, as if satisfied with the experiment, began scratching at it with his front feet, jerkily. A few seconds thus diligently spent, and Dorothy's wedding-ring went rolling across the floor.

Still she made no effort to retain it.

The rat gave playful chase; then, settling down suddenly into a stern business-like air of preoccupation, made off with his treasure, adding one more trophy to the strange collection of his hoard.

Presently he returned again; and this time, espying a little tortoise-shell hair-pin, jumped unhesitatingly upon the woman's head.

But she did not scream nor wake.

For together, hand in hand, two souls had passed out through the myst moonshine, across the dim golden barrier of Shadowland, and far out from the strife and turmoil of the Devil's Run, for ever.

And for ever.

A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF

ΝΕ

ORACLES.

[EAR the close of the fourth century of our era, fourteen hundred years after Homer had sung the first alighting of Apollo on Delphi, the confession was at length wrung from the oracle that the days of its prophesying were over, and that the inspiration had for ever passed away from the sacred laurel and the speaking fountain. This last despairing cry from the god of divination and of song is the formal acknowledgment of the triumph of Christianity, "the sinner's mournful creed," over the joyous nature-worship of the world's childhood. It speaks much for the vitality and truth of the Hellenic spirit that Apollo did not abdicate his throne as mankind's teacher and guide till after the lapse of so many troublous years. He had survived the invasion of his chosen country by barbarians from East and West and North: he had seen his chosen seat twice pillaged, only to rise again triumphant: he had remained unscathed while pagan philosophers directed their covert gibes and sneers at him; and he only yielded finally after a death struggle, protracted through four centuries, with the new religion of the world.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable things in the history of pagan oracles is the long duration of their influence after the birth of Christ. Yet in the first few years of our era every circumstance seemed to portend for them a speedy fall before the onslaughts of the first young and vigorous faith. The oracles of Greece were almost deserted, as Strabo, Diodorus, and even the credulous Livy inform us, and nobody paid heed to soothsaying or divination. The average opinion of educated men on the subject we may take to be fairly represented by Cicero, who, though professedly an adherent of the fashionable stoicism, was more or less of an eclectic in philosophy. "Let us have done," he exclaims at the close of the "De Divinatione," " "with all this divination by dreams and with every other kind of divination. For, in truth, superstition, taking advan