Here now Malherb chanced upon one who sat motionless on a bank with his feet in the mire. He turned as the other approached, but showed no interest at sight of him. "What lonely soul art thou?" cried Malherb; and as he spoke he remembered that for the first time in his life he heard a murderer's voice. The figure revealed a strange countenance, made stranger still by suffering. "No man me--just a skinful of hell-fire burning itself out! Get gone, for I poison the air around me. I never want ter see no human more." The speaker's awful despair had power to arrest one, himself despairing. Malherb came nearer, and sought confidence. His crime had shaken his nature and unsettled the tenour of his disposition as a drug unsettles human organs. Now he thirsted to talk. "You can rail so loud and confess so much! And yet here I stand; and to my misery yours, be it what it may, is the short grief of a child to a man's abiding woe." "Lordy, what big words! You to prattle about trouble, stranger--ter me--ter me--a man who's touched bottom deeper than any man since Judas hanged himself. Away you and sorrow that can bear speech! Leave me ter burn." An opal light from the West was in the speaker's eyes, and they glittered green. Their dreadful expression held Malherb, for agony far beyond the fear of death looked out of them. The sufferer's head was bare and nearly bald; his face was hatchet-shaped and narrow; the yellow skin seemed drawn to bursting over his high cheek-bones; and upon his chin was a fan-shaped and grizzled beard. "I perceive you are an American--a lonely wretch who might carry all his cursed country's crimes and sorrows on his own forehead. Yet what are national troubles to a man's own? You sit gazing and glaring. What then have you done that makes such a night of life for you?" "A thing Satan's self never did--a thing as would heat hell again if 'twere cold--a thing not yet writ against any starving ragtail on God's earth. Past hope--past praying for. And it seemed nought until it were done; but after--it's brought me ter this. Tell me, you who talk as if you knew big trouble, why did it seem nought till afterwards?" "What have you done?" "It seemed nought till afterwards, I tell you. Then it grew up into a mountain. The fallen angels will be took back ter heaven sooner than me. Prayer's vain beyond a certain pass. Has life showed you that?" "It has. Yet what is there in your torture that can make me unbosom mine?" "Because 'tis the first longing that comes after crimes--to tell 'em," said the American. "So you've prayed too?" he added. "'Prayed'? Yes, I've prayed hard and earnestly. I've frightened my horse by night as I suddenly challenged my God. I have dismounted and fallen upon my knees by lonely roads and secret places. I've bruised my soul and cried aloud to the Almighty and bade Him touch my fiend's temper and give me a clean heart."