After supper, to kill time until the hour of retiring, Carson declined the proffered cigar of his host, and to avoid the--to him--empty chatter of the others, now assembled on the little porch, he strolled down the street. Here groups of men sat in front of the stores in the dim light thrown from murky lamps within, but it happened that he was not recognized by any of them though there were several gaunt forms he knew, and he passed on, walking feverishly. On and on he strode till he had covered more than a mile and suddenly came upon a little church surrounded by a graveyard. He leaned upon the rotten fence and looked over at the mounds marked by white marble slabs in some cases, plain, unlettered natural stones in others, and some unmarked by any sort of monument, but having little white palings around them. Carson Dwight shuddered and turned his face back towards the village as he asked himself if this might be the resting-place of the man he had slain. Life to him had been so bounteous, despite all the trials he had encountered, that to think that he had by his own hand, even under gravest provocation, deprived a human being of its privileges gave him pain akin to nothing he had ever felt before. Reaching his room in the hotel, which was at the head of the stairs in the front part of the house, his first impulse was to lock his door--why, he could not have explained. It was not fear; what was it? With a defiant smile he left it unfastened and proceeded to undress himself. As he threw himself on his bed he became conscious of the impulse to say his prayers. What a queer thing! It had been years since he had actually knelt in prayer, and yet tonight he wanted to do so. A strange, hot, rebellious mood came over him a few minutes later as he lay staring at the disk on the sky-blue ceiling cast by the lamp-chimney. He felt like crying out to the infinite powers in tones of demand to lift the weird, stifling pall that was pressing down on him. The words his father had spoken in a rage when the old gentleman had first seen the wound on his forehead after Pete Warren's rescue now came to him with startling force: “All this for a trifling negro! Have you lost your senses?” What, Carson asked himself, would his father say to this deeper step--this headlong plunge into misfortune as the outcome of the cause he had espoused? Carson could not sleep, and fancying that if his light were out he might do so, he rose and extinguished it and went back to bed. But he was still restless. The hours dragged by. It was after twelve o'clock, when on the still night air came the steady beat of a horse's hoofs in the distance, growing louder and louder, till with a cry of “Woah!” the animal was reined in at the hotel door, and the stentorian voice of the rider called out: “Hello! hello in thar!” There was a pause, but no response. The landlord was evidently a sound sleeper.