The boy's thoughts rushed back upon him with a picture that forbade contemplation—a barren, dismal prospect—a measure of life that did not embrace Belle-Ann. He would choose death, he told himself, rather than gain and mislead her. Even had he sought to, he knew he could not withstand his own lie to her. She whose limpid, steadfast, child-eyes could read every line that crossed his soul—every thought that passed his eyes. He knew a lie would sheathe itself in its own being.

In his extremity, he stalked madly about the confines of this moon-touched mount. His perturbation waxed to a volcanic upheaval that now inflicted a physical pain. To him it was as if these two conflicting forces had confiscated his corporal structure for a ravaging mêlée, augmented by two combative rivals struggling in his own heart. His mad love for Belle-Ann—his blind adherence and faith in the code-honor of his hillman lineage. That there was something amiss in this faith his mind could not deny but, oddly enough, his heart hotly rejected it all, stirring him to mad, reckless action. Belle-Ann filled up the whole of Lem's wild, humble life. Without her the future held no hope. Without hope he wanted to die. His vain effort to dislodge the scourge within his soul, goaded him to maniacal thoughts.

Then, in an unlooked-for instant, an awful wrong shaped itself to a determination. He would hurl his tortured self over the cliff. He told himself that he was not fearful of the fall. In proof thereof, he rushed to the jagged brink of the ledge and looked down into hazy moonlit space and was unafraid.

With a desperate movement he snatched his hat off and cast it down at his feet. His toes inched over the abyss in his aberration. He gathered a long breath. His knees bent to the leap. His heels raised slowly under him; when in this instant a memory dashed upon him, and he straightened and stiffened, electrified.

The thought of Caleb Peevy rived into his muddled, benumbed mind. Caleb Peevy, who had jumped wilfully off Henhawk's Knob into Hellsfork three years since, and had gone to hell, so they said. A check of repugnance swept him as he recalled the lasting scorn and contempt of the mountain folk, and the epithet of coward—coward that followed Peevy past the grave with its two-edged stigma that linked, inseparably, to his memory to-night.

Lem drew back, stung with self-shame. A hope drifted back into his distraught breast. He looked upward into the astral sky for God's guiding star that Maw Lutts had shown to him. All a-quiver, he watched for the flambeau of Belle-Ann's pious prophecy: "Know ye the truth and the truth shall make ye free!" A divine revelation ebbed across his chaotic senses.

With a sudden replenished faith he looked to God, as he recalled the despised, loathsome dead man now lying on the altar of the church—asleep now, across the crimson picture that his, now dead, hand had shaped with the blood of Lem's father. Surely none but God's hand had wrought this retribution. Verily, this Omnipotent Being would not forsake him now?

He was now sensible to the God-sent monitor that had saved him from McGill. He was sensible to the Providential agency that saved him from the Judas, Orlick.

With praises, he remembered Belle-Ann's escape from this vampire. Surely this self-same God would not deny him now. Lem did not mumble disjointedly now. He did not whisper incoherent, aimless pleas.

Now, from the crest of the world, his aching breast heaving, and his erring feet firm upon his ancestral Rock of Ages, he lifted his face up to the trembling stars, as with outstretched, pleading arms he cried out vociferously to God for Him to come to him—called out, in ringing, fulsome words that carried afar, for Him to hasten, lest he perish in the conflict that made blind agony within him.