crushing it. His body was twisting and writhing as a tree might
in a terrific wind storm, and his eyes were glistening and dry--Oh, so
dry, she thought They reminded her of pieces of hot glass. "Hear me," he
was saying.

At the final Judgment, some poor soul will stand and face its Creator
with just this sort of cry;--some soul which has grievously sinned will
bend, and writhe, and implore with hot, glassy eyes, to be heard. Jane
felt this in all its varicolored meaning. Until now she had been
speaking as the teacher, as the humanitarian. But with his
torture-stricken eyes pouring their prayer into her own, with the storm
bending his powerful frame before its fury, she felt the old pity, the
old interest, rise up in his defense.

"Hear me, hear me," he was murmuring, until her softening attitude
touched somewhere upon the receiver of his subliminal mind. Then he
responded, and bent eagerly over her.

"I'd rather die a thousand times than have you turn your back," he
whispered. It was a magic whisper, made magnetic by that fascinating
dilation and contraction of his pupils; but the great body still swayed
awkwardly. The storm was still there. "You know what life is to me," he
was saying. "You know how I'm fightin' to get my share of learnin'; an'
how much I've got to do! You--just you, Miss Jane, can take me on! If
you quit, how will I end? Just drift 'round! I know! Do you want my
hand--my left hand? I'll cut it off if that'll show you how I feel! I'd
cut off the other, but it can write!" There was just at that instant a
glorious pride in his voice. Now it was again mystical as he continued:
"Don't blame me too hard! You know how I was raised! You know yourself
what a puny price we put on life! And you know how we do whenever
someone stands in our way! Didn't I have a better right to sweep my road
clear than most of my folks, who don't know half the time what they're
killin' about? You know our people, an' you know that when Granny put
Pap's gun in my hands, an' smeared his blood on me, an' made me swear to
get those fellers, I did right to get 'em--'cause I was brought up to do
those things, an' didn't know anything else! But after you got to
teachin' me, I said a thousand times to myself I'd never kill anybody
again--an' I wouldn't have, if that varmint Potter hadn't yelled your
name in public, an' said what he'd tried to do!"

"I didn't know that," her cheeks were flaming. "I hadn't heard about
that!"

"Well, h