“To die in bed at last,” he said, “like a monk with liver complaint—or worse still—my God, like a mad dog, unless—unless—her lips—Helen!”
He lay quite still on the soft grass and looked up at the stars. How comfortable he was! He felt around.
A boy's overcoat was under him—a little round-about, wadded up, was his pillow.
He smiled—touched: “What a man he will make—the brave little devil! Oh, if I can live to tell him he is mine, that I married his mother secretly—that I broke her heart with my faithlessness—that she died and the other is—is her sister.”
He heard the clamor and the talk behind him. The mob, cool now, were laying their plans only on revenge,—revenge with the torch and the bullet.
Jud Carpenter was the leader, and Travis could hear him giving his orders. How he now loathed the man—for somehow, as he thought, Jud Carpenter stood for all the seared, blighted, dead life behind him—all the old disbelief, all the old infamy, all the old doubt and shame. But now, dying, he saw things differently. Yonder above him shone the stars and in his heart the glory of that touch of God—the thing that made him wish rather to die than have it leave him again to live in his old way.
He heard the mob talking. He heard their plans. He knew that Jud Carpenter, hating the old preacher as he did, would rather kill him than any wolf of the forest. He knew that neither Tom Travis nor the old preacher could ever hope to come out alive.
The torches were ready—the men were aligned in front with deadly shotguns.
“When the fire gets hot,” he heard Jud Carpenter say, “they'll hafter come out—then shoot—shoot an' shoot to kill. See our own dead!”
They answered him with groans, with curses, with shouts of “Lead us on, Jud Carpenter!”