sank back on the floor. His screams were ended; but as he lay
there he still moaned, "What for?"

Then the moaning ceased, the eyelids quivered and the breath grew faint.

But even then his father had not exercised enough of his "personal
liberty." The imps of hell hissed him on. The torturing fire within him
leaped higher and higher, searing his soul. He bent low over the body
and beat it still, till the tender bones crushed under the blows. Then
throwing the knotty stick, quivering with his own child's blood, into a
corner, with a fearful scream the murderer dashed out into the night.

Then the mother crept back, but it was too late. The little life had
gone. From somewhere out of the mysterious, breezy night, perhaps, the
spirit of Maggie had come, and had taken the soul of her poor brother to
a city where pain and tears are unknown.

But another voice had been added to the chorus of suffering children as
by the million they cry out in their pain till the appeal of outraged
childhood goes thundering and reverberating into the ear of the Almighty
Father, while he writes the "What for" of their wailing protest in the
book of his remembrance as the record unto the day of Christian
America's reckoning, in letters that burn brighter as the curse waxes
worse and worse.

Against the name of the church, too, as she wraps her righteous robes
around herself and will not, in her dignity and purity, set her mighty
foot on the neck of the curse, while drunkards by unnumbered thousands
stagger under her colored glass windows to Hell, he writes WHAT FOR? and
the letters burn on.

Against the name of the Christian whose vote makes strong the party that
legalizes the saloon and the drunkard he writes "WHAT FOR?"

What man shall stand in the presence of the Holy One, when the books are
opened, and tell WHAT FOR?

CHAPTER IX.

GILBERT ALLISON HEARS A VOICE.

It was this night that two travelers were journeying across a bit of
suburban country toward their city homes. They were out later than they
had expected to be, perhaps. At any rate, it was somewhere close to the
hour of midnight and they were approaching an old graveyard.

As they neared the ancient burying ground Mr. Allison, for he was one of
the riders, became less talkative, and rode closer to his friend, a
young man of about his own age.

"Hist, Sammy! Didn't you hear something? Ah! Now it has gone again. You
were not quick enough. Keep your ear open. At