And then, with a cry, Morse threw himself upon the nearest armed guard, and a fierce struggle began.  He had overpowered one adversary and seized another in his hopeless fight toward the cart when the half-astonished crowd felt that something must be done.  It was done with a sharp report, the upward curl of smoke and the falling back of the guard as Morse staggered forward free—­with a bullet in his heart.  Yet even then he did not fall until he reached the cart, when he lapsed forward, dead, with his arms outstretched and his head at the doomed man’s feet.

There was something so supreme and all-powerful in this hopeless act of devotion that the heart of the multitude thrilled and then recoiled aghast at its work, and a single word or a gesture from the doomed man himself would have set him free.  But they say—­and it is credibly recorded—­that as Captain Jack Despard looked down upon the hopeless sacrifice at his feet his eyes blazed, and he flung upon the crowd a curse so awful and sweeping that, hardened as they were, their blood ran cold, and then leaped furiously to their cheeks.

“And now,” he said, coolly tightening the rope around his neck with a jerk of his head—­“Go on, and be damned to you!  I’m ready.”

They did not hesitate this time.  And Martin Morse and Captain Jack Despard were buried in the same grave.

A CONVERT OF THE MISSION

The largest tent of the Tasajara camp meeting was crowded to its utmost extent.  The excitement of that dense mass was at its highest pitch.  The Reverend Stephen Masterton, the single erect, passionate figure of that confused medley of kneeling worshipers, had reached the culminating pitch of his irresistible exhortatory power.  Sighs and groans were beginning to respond to his appeals, when the reverend brother was seen to lurch heavily forward and fall to the ground.

At first the effect was that of a part of his performance; the groans redoubled, and twenty or thirty brethren threw themselves prostrate in humble imitation of the preacher.  But Sister Deborah Stokes, perhaps through some special revelation of feminine intuition, grasped the fallen man, tore loose his black silk necktie, and dragged him free of the struggling, frantic crowd whose paroxysms he had just evoked.  Howbeit he was pale and unconscious, and unable to continue the service.  Even the next day, when he had slightly recovered, it was found that any attempt to renew his fervid exhortations produced the same disastrous result.

A council was hurriedly held by the elders.  In spite of the energetic protests of Sister Stokes, it was held that the Lord “was wrestlin’ with his sperrit,” and he was subjected to the same extraordinary treatment from the whole congregation that he himself had applied to them.  Propped up pale and trembling in the “Mourners’ Bench” by two brethren, he was “striven with,” exhorted, prayed over, and admonished, until insensibility mercifully succeeded convulsions.  Spiritual therapeutics having failed, he was turned over to the weak and carnal nursing of “womenfolk.”  But after a month of incapacity he was obliged to yield to “the flesh,” and, in the local dialect, “to use a doctor.”