“This is the place to die,” he said grimly—“here with my boots on. To die like a Travis and unravel this thing called life. Unravel it to the end of the thread and know if it ends there, is snapped, is broken or—
“Or—my God,” he cried aloud, “I never knew what those two little letters meant before—not till I face them this way, on the Edge of Things!”
He gathered the mob together and led them against the jail—with hoots and shouts and curses; with flaming torches, and crow-bars, with axes and old guns.
“Lynch her—lynch the old witch! and hang that devil Conway with her!” was the shout.
In front of the jail they stopped, for a man stood at the door. His left arm was in a sling, but in his right hand gleamed something that had proved very deadly before. And he stood there as he had stood in the edge of the wood, and the bonfires and torches of the mob lit up more clearly the deadly pale face, set and more determined than before.
For as he stood, pale and silent, the shaft of a terrible pain,—of broken bone and lacerated muscle—twinged and twitched his arm, and to smother it and keep from crying out he gripped bloodlessly—nervously—the stock of his pistol saying over and over:
“I am a Conway again—a man again!”
And so standing he defied them and they halted, like sheep at the door of the shambles. The sheriff had flown, and Conway alone stood between the frenzied mob and the old woman who had given her all for him.
He could hear her praying within—an uncanny mixture of faith and miracle—of faith which saw as Paul saw, and which expected angels to come and break down her prison doors. And after praying she would break out into a song, the words of which nerved the lone man who stood between her and death:
“'I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry, I can tarry but a night.
Do not detain me, for I am going
To where the streamlets are ever flowing.
I'm a pilgrim—and I'm a stranger
I can tarry—I can tarry but a night.'”