He put his hands to his head and fell back again on the pillow, with a little moan.

“Well, it ain’t strange I didn’t know you.  I was looking for a big man.  You seemed as big as a house to me that day.  I forgot that I’d grown up and you might be small.  When those fellows got tight up there and let on like it was you that some folks hinted had took a child and kept it out of that muss, I couldn’t hardly believe it; and everybody seeming to regard you so highly.  And I couldn’t believe this big girl was little Prue Girnway that I remembered.  It seemed like you two would have to be a great big man and a little bit of a baby girl with yellow hair; and now I find you’re—­say, Mister, honestly, you’re such a poor, broke-down, little coot it seems a’most like a shame to put a bullet through you, in spite of all your doings!”

The little man sat up again, with new animation in his eyes,—­the same eager boyishness that he had somehow kept through all his years.

“Don’t!” he exclaimed, earnestly.  “Let me beg you, don’t kill me!  For your own sake—­not for mine.  I’m a poor, meatless husk.  I’ll die soon at best, and I’m already in a hell you can’t make any hotter.  Let me do you this service; let me persuade you not to kill me.  Have you ever killed a man?”

“No, not yet; I’ve allowed to a couple of times, but it’s never come just that way.”

“You ought to thank God.  Don’t ever.  You’ll be in hell as sure as you do,—­a hell right here that you must carry inside of you forever—­that even God can’t take out of you.  Listen—­it’s a great secret, worth millions.  If you’re so bad you can’t forgive yourself, you have to suffer hell-fire no matter how much the Lord forgives you.  It sounds queer, but there’s the limit to His power.  He’s made us so nearly in His image that we have to win our own forgiveness; why, you can see yourself, it had to be that way; there would have been no dignity to a soul that could swallow all its own wickedness so long as the Lord could.  God has given us to know good and evil for ourselves—­and we have to take the consequences.  Look at me.  I suffer day and night, and always must.  God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself, for my own sin and my people’s sin,—­for my preaching was one of the things that led them into that meadow.  I know that Christ died for us, but that can’t put out this fire that I have to build in my own soul.  I tell you a man is like an angel, he can be good or bad; he has a power for heaven but the same power for hell—­”

“See here, I don’t know anything about all this hell-talk, but I do know—­”

“I tell you death is the very last thing I have left to look forward to, but if you kill me it will be your own undoing.  You will never get me out of your eyes or your ears, poor wreck as I am—­so feeble.  You can see what my punishment has been.  A little while ago I was young, and strong, and proud like you, fearing nothing and wanting everything, but something was wrong.  I was climbing up as I thought, and then all at once I saw I had been climbing down—­down into a pit I never could get out of.  You will be there if you kill me.”  He sank back on the bed again.