rayer-meeting to lay his crimes before the Mercy Seat!

It was quite true that it was prayer-meeting night, and as the merciless
wags left the shed, the voice of brother Rigby the chemist was narrating
for the hundredth time the story of his conversion, when, as he said,
"the pains of hell gat hold of him." Brother Rigby loved to relate the
tortures of the day when he was convicted of sin; but on this night his
ancient story seemed appropriate, as he had dealt with great severity on
the doings of the backslider, Joel Mazarine.

When the two wags returned to the front street of Askatoon, they were
just in time to see the second meeting of Orlando and Mazarine. Mazarine
had not been able to find his horses at any hotel or livery stable, or
in any street. It was at the moment, when, in his distraction, he had
decided to walk back to Tralee, that Orlando, driving up the street, saw
him. Orlando reined in his horses dropped from his buggy and approached
him.

There was a look in Orlando's eyes which was a reflection from a remote
past, from ancestors who had settled their troubles with the first
weapon and the best opportunity to their hands. "The furrin element in
him," as Jonas Billings called it, had been at full flood ever since he
had bade his mother good-bye. A storm of anger had been raised in him.
As he said to himself, he had had enough; he had been filled up to the
chin by the Mazarine business; and his impulsive youth wanted to end it
by some smashing act which would be sensational and decisive. So it was
that Fate offered the opportunity, as he came up the front street of
Askatoon, and found himself face to face with Mazarine, over against the
offices of Burlingame.

"A word with you, Mr. Mazarine," he said, with the air of a man who
wants to ease his mind of its trouble by action. "Back there at the
station, I kept my tongue and let you down easy enough, because my
mother was present. She is old and sensitive, and she doesn't like to
see her son doing the dirty work every man must do some time or other,
when there's street cleaning to be done. Now, let me tell you this:
you've slandered as good a girl, you've libelled as straight a wife, as
the best man in the world ever had. You've made a public scandal of
your private home. You've treated the pure thing as if it were the foul
thing; and yet, you want to keep the pure thing that you treat like a
foul thing, under your rawhide whip, because it's young and bea