, he
was rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweeping
over the country, carrying fear and frenzy with him, scouting life and
mercy, and crushing alike the guilty and innocent, he came one Sabbath
to a rocky crest of the Sierras--the last tattered and frayed and soiled
fringe of civilization on the opened tract of a great highway. And here
he was to "testify," as was his wont.

But not as he expected. For as he stood up on a boulder above the thirty
or forty men sitting or lying upon other rocks and boulders around him,
on the craggy mountain shelf where they had gathered, a man also rose,
elbowed past them, and with a hurried impulse tried to descend
the declivity. But a cry was suddenly heard from others, quick and
clamoring, which called the whole assembly to its feet, and it was seen
that the fugitive had in some blundering way fallen from the precipice.

He was brought up cruelly maimed and mangled, his ribs crushed, and one
lung perforated, but still breathing and conscious. He had asked to see
the preacher. Death impending, and even then struggling with his breath,
made this request imperative. Madison Wayne stopped the service, and
stalked grimly and inflexibly to where the dying man lay. But there he
started.

"McGee!" he said breathlessly.

"Send these men away," said McGee faintly. "I've got suthin' to tell
you."

The men drew back without a word. "You thought I was dead," said McGee,
with eyes still undimmed and marvelously clear. "I orter bin, but it
don't need no doctor to say it ain't far off now. I left the Bar to get
killed; I tried to in a row, but the fellows were skeert to close with
me, thinkin' I'd shoot. My reputation was agin me, there! You follow me?
You understand what I mean?"

Kneeling beside him now and grasping both his hands, the changed and
horror-stricken Wayne gasped, "But"--

"Hold on! I jumped off the Sacramento boat--I was goin' down the third
time--they thought on the boat I was gone--they think so now! But a
passin' fisherman dived for me. I grappled him--he was clear grit and
would have gone down with me, but I couldn't let him die too--havin' so
to speak no cause. You follow me--you understand me? I let him save me.
But it was all the same, for when I got to 'Frisco I read as how I was
drowned. And then I reckoned it was all right, and I wandered HERE,
where I wasn't known--until I saw you."

"But why should you want to die?" said Wayne, almost fier