"We've got 'em both! Hang 'em both! Make a clean sweep and clean the kentry of them!" yelled the crowd.
"I am no thief!" cried Ben. "My name is Benjamin Cleveland. Boston is my home. I am walking to New Orleans on a wager. You can prove it by telegraph and hang me if it is not so."
A derisive laugh greeted this information.
"Walkin' to New Orleans, air ye? Well ye'll hev to walk another route, and a warmer one!"
"Rope him! Rope him! Let's clean the State of the villains, and leave 'em hanging up as a warning!"
As this was shouted Ben felt a rope thrown over his neck, and the next instant both he and the Evangelist were jerked into the air amid a chorus of yells. There was a confused murmur of voices beneath him. He struggled and kicked. Tried to loose the rope that was strangling him with his hands. The froth oozed from his mouth. The confined blood seemed bursting his head. Ten thousand bells were clanging in his ears. He tried to cry out. A low gurgle escaped him. Then all grew black and blank.
When Ben regained consciousness he was lying at the foot of the oak tree with a loosened rope around his neck. His head seemed gigantic in its size and his lips were parched. The grey light of morning was struggling over the eastern hills. Not a soul was in sight. No,—not a soul.
But turning his eyes upward they encountered a sight that caused him to close them again with a groan of horror. For there, swinging gently to and fro, in the morning breeze, hung the stiff, lifeless body of Horton the Evangelist. His eyes bulging from their sockets, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth, and his gaunt face tinted with the leaden palor of stagnant blood.
Dead! Hung by the neck. Dead!
As the eye of God came grandly up over the eastern horizon, it glanced upon awakening nature, and fell upon that hideous, untenanted clod of abused clay, that gently swung from the sturdy oak. And as it glanced on the ruin and devastation the little church fell in its way. And it took the shadow of the steeple along over the road and over the open space, to the woods, clean to the foot of the oak tree, up which it pointed like some avenging finger. Up and still up crept the shadow until it reached the body of the dead man with the weather-vane. And, Lo! When Ben again dared to lift his eyes, there, on the stark, still, pulseless breast of the Evangelist, was THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS!