If Lem Lutts had possessed a pistol, he would have killed himself in that instant. Quaking perceptibly, he hung back from the cell door. His hand trembled as he held to the railing of the iron porch. His lips moved, and he tried to tell the convict something. The world seemed to be falling about his ears, carrying his soul down into the fumes of hades. Of all the subtle, dormant influences that awake, and invade the scheme of human life to sway the impulses of men, there is none so bewildering as this phase of psychological prompting which holds its profound mystery intact, and baffles solution. Where is the abode, and what is the origin of this plenipotent conjurer? Certainly Lem Lutts trembled at the threshold of this stone cell. Last Time could see that. What sweeping, pillaging power was this that assaulted Lem's will, causing him to quake thus like an aspen. Surely it was an abstruse form of fear. Verily, it could not have been the stigma of cowardice. Lem Lutts had never known fear. From the very cradle his life had been enveloped in danger. Deeds stood out boldly to refute this suspicion of weakness. Scores of times in Lem Lutts' life he had looked into the grim teeth of on-coming death unflinchingly and unafraid, with a self-forgetfulness that spells sublime courage. But here he stood now, on the brink of a moment that was in some strange, exaggerated way, awful to him. He stood, pale and shaken, in front of this black jail-cell, undeniably fear-stricken. Perhaps this was the same quality of fear that caused Napoleon to dismount, cursing his horse, pale, sick, and unsteady for an hour, because his steed had crushed a camp cat with its hoofs. Possibly it was the same subtle thing that inspired the late C. K. Hamilton, the most daring of all aviators, to rush in panic from a dental chair. It may have been the same brand of unknown dread that impelled one of the greatest war conquerors in American history to shun a graveyard after nightfall. Some time or other this strange power lays hold of the bravest hearts. It had Lem Lutts now, and he was backing away and trying to get down the stairs. Last Time spoke to him gently, as he took his arm and urged him slowly into 420. "Hurry up, Lutts--don't you hear 'em? They're lockin' up now, and I've got to run the tier for the bull--there now--I know just how you feel--I've forgot all the other times, but I've never forgot the first--and God knows I never will. You can't tell me--but you'll be all right--I'll come and talk to you after a while. They don't lock me up until eleven o'clock." Lem had stepped inside gingerly, as if he expected the floor to collapse and engulf him. There was a dull rolling, a click, and the iron-barred door was closed upon him.