of his head--"Go on, and be damned to you! I'm ready."

They did not hesitate this time. And Martin Morse and Captain Jack
Despard were buried in the same grave.

A CONVERT OF THE MISSION

The largest tent of the Tasajara camp meeting was crowded to its utmost
extent. The excitement of that dense mass was at its highest pitch. The
Reverend Stephen Masterton, the single erect, passionate figure of that
confused medley of kneeling worshipers, had reached the culminating
pitch of his irresistible exhortatory power. Sighs and groans were
beginning to respond to his appeals, when the reverend brother was seen
to lurch heavily forward and fall to the ground.

At first the effect was that of a part of his performance; the groans
redoubled, and twenty or thirty brethren threw themselves prostrate in
humble imitation of the preacher. But Sister Deborah Stokes, perhaps
through some special revelation of feminine intuition, grasped the
fallen man, tore loose his black silk necktie, and dragged him free
of the struggling, frantic crowd whose paroxysms he had just evoked.
Howbeit he was pale and unconscious, and unable to continue the service.
Even the next day, when he had slightly recovered, it was found that any
attempt to renew his fervid exhortations produced the same disastrous
result.

A council was hurriedly held by the elders. In spite of the energetic
protests of Sister Stokes, it was held that the Lord "was wrestlin' with
his sperrit," and he was subjected to the same extraordinary treatment
from the whole congregation that he himself had applied to THEM. Propped
up pale and trembling in the "Mourners' Bench" by two brethren, he
was "striven with," exhorted, prayed over, and admonished, until
insensibility mercifully succeeded convulsions. Spiritual therapeutics
having failed, he was turned over to the weak and carnal nursing of
"womenfolk." But after a month of incapacity he was obliged to yield to
"the flesh," and, in the local dialect, "to use a doctor."

It so chanced that the medical practitioner of the district was a man
of large experience, of military training, and plain speech. When,
therefore, he one day found in his surgery a man of rude Western type,
strong-limbed and sunburned, but trembling, hesitating and neurotic in
movement, after listening to his symptoms gravely, he asked, abruptly:
"And how much are you drinking now?"

"I am a lifelong abstainer," stammered his patient in quivering
indi