vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used
to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the
extremes of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the
most ascetic. His was a bestial face, a. face that bore the stamp
of Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting
over the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and
then brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy,
the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely
except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like
a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep,
rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp,
strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over
those seamed cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught
from many a vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her
worst with that face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening
and almost transfiguring it. Tonight, as his muscles twitched with
emotion, and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there
was a certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a
man possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before
which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction
which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which
debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and
a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner
tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
Skinner's God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve
vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone