his lips with satisfaction at what was in store for it. His visit
to Wallace was not very important, anyway, and it could wait on more
important events.

"There sits a sinner!" thundered out the exhorter, and Hopalong looked
stealthily around for a sight of a villain. "God only has the right to
punish. 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, and whosoever takes the
law into his own hands, whosoever takes human life, defies the Creator.
There sits a man who has killed his fellow-men, his brothers! Are you
not a sinner, _Cassidy_?"

Cassidy jumped clear of the bench as he jerked his head around and
stared over the suddenly outstretched arm and pointing finger of the
speaker and into his accusing eyes.

"Answer me! Are you not a sinner?"

Hopalong stood up, confused, bewildered, and then his suspended thoughts
stirred and formed. "Guilty, I reckon, an' in the first degree. But they
didn't get no more'n what was coming to 'em, no more'n they earned. An'
that's straight!"

"How do you know they didn't? How do you know they earned it? How do you
_know_?" demanded the evangelist, who was delighted with the chance to
argue with a sinner. He had great faith in "personal contact," and
his was the assurance of training, of the man well rehearsed and fully
prepared. And he knew that if he should be pinned into a corner by logic
and asked for _his_ proofs, that he could squirm out easily and take the
offensive again by appealing to faith, the last word in sophistry, and a
greater and more powerful weapon than intelligence. _This_ was his game,