"Shut up, will you! This is no time for joking!" The young man complied with the request of his polite friend, and thought to himself, but Mr. Allison was no better pleased. He knew that if he had not seen it, it would have been. It really was. He was deeply stirred. And as he rode on through the night he was thinking new and strange thoughts. CHAPTER X. "THE SIN BURDEN." After Gilbert Allison arrived home from that ride, the ghostly night on which he saw the fruits of a sinful traffic in all its horror, he hastily disrobed and turned into bed, hoping to sleep away the unpleasant thoughts and pictures that had possession of his mind; but no sooner had sleep overtaken him than a face, framed in a halo of red-brown hair, looked down upon him from an eminence; a white hand with a phosphorescent glow pointed at him, while a voice kept repeating, to the accompaniment of a childish wail, "Man--atom of the great iniquity, man--atom of the great iniquity." In his dream he did not recognize the face nor voice, and yet both seemed strangely familiar to him. When daylight came, the face and the white hand and the moaning child went away and the face of the woman whose misery he had looked upon haunted him, and her bitter prayer came to him in snatches. The experience was distressing in no small degree to the ease-loving man. He could not analyze his feelings and was not aware that what one strange little woman called a "sin burden" had fallen with its weight upon him. He was in the act of rubbing his eyes before his moral resurrection. * * * * * Damon Crowley was behind the bars for the last time. Perhaps he did not know, at any rate he did not care. He had reached the beginning of the end. From the corners of his cell dark faces leered at him; cruel, sharp claws closed around his limbs and icy fingers grasped his throat--yet he was not dead. Outlines of things he saw became to him living creatures of destruction and crouched over him, grinning in his face and tearing him to bits--yet he was not dead. Snarling beasts sank their fangs into his flesh, a thousand poison insects rushed and swarmed upon him, and he felt the virus of their sting bounding through his body--yet he lived. Slimy serpents wriggled over him, thrusting their forked tongues into his nose and ears, and when he grabbed frantically to tear them away they had gone. A fire burned within him and he tore his flesh and hair, while death like a dark shadow hovered nearer and nearer, closing in slowly but surely. The end of Damon Crowley was not as a child falls to sleep nor as a Christian steps into the great beyond. It was a time of screams and groans; of frantic clutchings and hard grapplings. Those in neighboring cells were glad for once that the walls were thick and the bolts secure. * * * * *