He saw those in the procession form about the cross and fling themselves upon the ground before it, while all the others round about knelt.  He saw the monk, standing alone, raise the smaller cross in his hands above them, as if in blessing.  High above it all, he saw the crucified one, the head lying over on the shoulder.

Then he, too, flung himself face down in the sand, weeping hysterically, calling wildly, and trying again to utter his prayer.  Once more he dared to look up, in some sudden distrust of his eyes.  Again he saw the prostrate figures, the kneeling ones farther back, the brown-cowled monk with arms upraised, and the face of agony on the cross.

He was down in the sand again, now with enough control of himself to cry out his prayer over and over.  When he next looked, the vision was gone.  Only a few light clouds ruffled the southern horizon.

He sank back on the sands in an ecstasy.  His Witness had come—­not as he thought it would, in a moment of spiritual uplift; but when he had been sunk by his own sin to fearful depths.  Nor had it brought any message of glory for himself, of gifts or powers.  Only the mission of suffering and service and suffering again at the end.  But it was enough.

How long he lay in the joy of the realisation he never knew, but sleep or faintness at last overcame him.

He was revived by the sharp chill of night, and sat up to find his mind clear, alert, and active with new purposes.  He had suffered greatly from thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could not move his swollen tongue.  He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold of the desert night aroused all his latent force.  He struggled to his feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he had left in the morning.  How he reached the hills again he never knew, nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement.  But there he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the desert.

The day which he next remembered clearly, and from which he dated his new life, was one when he was back in the Meadows.  He had ridden there in the first vagueness and weakness of his recovery, without purpose, yet feeling that he must go.  What he found there made him believe he had been led to the spot.  Stark against the glow of the western sky as he rode up, was a huge cross.  He stopped, staring in wonder, believing it to be another vision; but it stayed before him, rigid, bare, and uncompromising.  He left his horse and climbed up to it.  At its base was piled a cairn of stones, and against this was a slab with an inscription:—­

“Here 120 Men, Women, and Children Were Massacred in Cold Blood Early in September, 1857.”

On the cross itself was carved in deep letters:—­

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”