"We are in for it, Bishop," said Captain Tom, as he saw the preparation; "this is worse than Franklin, because there we could protect our rear." He leaped up on his barricade, tall and splendid, and called to them quietly and with deadly calm: "Go to your homes, men--go! But if you will come, know that I fought for my country's laws from Shiloh to Franklin, and I can die for them here!" Then he took from over his heart a small silken flag, spangled with stars and the blood-splotches of his father who fell in Mexico, and he shook it out and flung it over his barricade, saying cheerily: "I am all right for a fight now, Bishop. But oh, for just one of my guns--just one of my old Parrots that I had last week at Franklin!" The old man, praying on his knees behind his barricade, said: "Twelve years ago, Cap'n Tom, twelve years. Not last week." The mob had left Richard Travis for dead, and in the fury of their defeat had thought no more of him. But now, the loss of blood, the cool night air revived him. He sat up, weak, and looked around. Everywhere bonfires burned. Men were running about. He heard their talk and he knew all. He was shot through the left lung, so near to his heart that, as he felt it, he wondered how he had escaped. He knew it by the labored breathing, by the blood that ran down and half filled his left boot. But his was a constitution of steel--an athlete, a hunter, a horseman, a man of the open. The bitterness of it all came back to him when he found he was not dead as he had hoped--as he had made Jack Bracken shoot to do. "To die in bed at last," he said, "like a monk with liver complaint--or worse still--my God, like a mad dog, unless--unless--her lips--Helen!" He lay quite still on the soft grass and looked up at the stars. How comfortable he was! He felt around. A boy's overcoat was under him--a little round-about, wadded up, was his pillow. He smiled--touched: "What a man he will make--the brave little devil! Oh, if I can live to tell him he is mine, that I married his mother secretly--that I broke her heart with my faithlessness--that she died and the other is--is her sister." He heard the clamor and the talk behind him. The mob, cool now, were laying their plans only on revenge,--revenge with the torch and the bullet. Jud Carpenter was the leader, and Travis could hear him giving his orders. How he now loathed the man--for somehow, as he thought, Jud Carpenter stood for all the seared, blighted, dead life behind him--all the old disbelief, all the old infamy, all the old doubt and shame. But now, dying, he saw things differently. Yonder above him shone the stars and in his heart the glory of that touch of God--the thing that made him wish rather to die than have it leave him again to live in his old way.