brother, sole survivor of that fraternal and religious partnership so
well known to the camp, although shown only by a grim and speechless
melancholy,--broken by unintelligible outbursts of religious
raving,--was so real, that it affected even the callous camp. But
scarcely had it regained its feverish distraction, before it was
thrilled by another sensation. Alexander McGee had fallen from the deck
of a Sacramento steamboat in the Straits of Carquinez, and his body had
been swept out to sea. The news had apparently been first to reach the
ears of his devoted wife, for when the camp--at this lapse of the old
prohibition--climbed to her bower with their rude consolations, the
house was found locked and deserted. The fateful influence of the
promontory had again prevailed, the grim record of its seclusion was
once more unbroken.

For with it, too, drooped and faded the fortunes of the Bar. Madison
Wayne sold out his claim, endowed the church at the Cross Roads with the
proceeds, and the pulpit with his grim, hopeless, denunciatory presence.
The first rains brought a freshet to the Bar. The river leaped the
light barriers that had taken the place of Wayne's peaceful engines,
and regained the old channel. The curse that the Rev. Madison Wayne had
launched on this riverside Sodom seemed to have been fulfilled. But even
this brought no satisfaction to the gloomy prophet, for it was presently
known that he had abandoned his terror-stricken flock to take the
circuit as revivalist preacher and camp-meeting exhorter, in the rudest
and most lawless of gatherings. Desperate ruffians writhed at his feet
in impotent terror or more impotent rage; murderers and thieves listened
to him with blanched faces and set teeth, restrained only by a more
awful fear. Over and over again he took his life with his Bible into his
own hands when he rose above the excited multitude; he was shot at, he
was rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweeping