d the wagon
cover into the invisible world she peopled with the dead. Her body was
rigid; her face had the ossified gray look of stone; the labored jerks
in which she spoke racked her body with the effort that it cost.

"Now--they're coming! The smoke rolls back a bit--I see--quite
plain--Oh! Oh!" A look of horror froze on her gray face, and her voice
rose to a shriek. "He says he's Mormon Joe! He cries--Confess! Confess!"

To Mullendore with his inflamed brain and nerves jangling like a network
of loose wire, she seemed like a direct emissary from the place of
torment, which was as real to him as the wagon in which he lay.

The half-breed had tried to convince himself by saying over and over
mechanically: "There ain't no hell--there ain't no comin' back--there
ain't nothin' after this,"--but the denial was only of the lips--atavism
was stronger than his will. He believed, as much as he believed that on
the morrow the sun would rise, in a real and definite hell, filled with
the shrieking spirits of the damned. In these final hours it had
required all his weakened will to hide his fears and keep his tongue
between his teeth. Now, like a man clinging by his finger tips to some
small crevice in a cliff, he suddenly gave up. As he relaxed his grip he
whispered with the last faint remnant of his strength:

"I own up--I set the gun--I--I--"

Teeters slipped an arm about his shoulders and raised him up.

"Where did you git it, Mullendore?"

His answer was a breath.

"Toomey."

"One thing more--Where does Kate Prentice's father live? His
address--quick!" Teeters shook the wasted shoulders in his haste.

The muddy blue-gray iris was divided in half by the closing upper lids.
Beneath the glaze there seemed a last malicious spark. Then his tongue
clicked as it dropped to the back of his mouth, and Mullendore was
dead.

CHAPTER XXIV

TOOMEY GOES INTO SOMETHING

Few in Prouty denied that there were forty-eight hours in the day that
began about six o'clock on Saturday night and lasted until the same hour
Monday morning. If there had been some way of taking a mild anesthetic
to have carried them through this period, many no doubt would have
resorted to it, for oblivion was preferable to consciousness during a
Sunday in Prouty.

It could not, strictly, be called a Day of Rest, because there was not
sufficient business during the week to make any one tired enough to need
it.

When the church bells tinkled, th