“‘You, Bishop?  Thank God!’”

“He made his simple confession.  I anointed him and brought him Viaticum from the tabernacle in the church.  Then the eyes went wild again, and I saw when they opened and looked at me that he had already turned around, and was again walking through the shadows of the Great Valley that ends the Long Road.

[Illustration:  “Then I learned—­old priest and bishop as I was—­I learned my lesson.”]

“Through the night we three, the old woman, the boy and myself, watched him and listened to his wanderings.  Then I learned—­old priest and bishop as I was—­I learned my lesson.  The lips that never spoke a complaint were moved, but not by his will, to go over the story of two terrible years.  It was a sad story.  It began with his great zeal.  He wanted to do so much, but the black discouragement of everything slowly killed his hopes.  He saw the Faith going from his people.  He saw that they were ceasing to care.  The town was then, as it is to-day, McDermott’s town, but McDermott had fallen away when his riches came, and some terrible event, a quarrel with a former priest who had attended Alta from a distant point, had left McDermott bitter.  He practically drove the pastor from his door.  He closed his factory to the priest’s people and one by one they left.  Only eighteen families stayed.  The dying priest counted them over in his dreams, and sobbed as he told of the others who had gone.  Then the bigotry that McDermott’s faith had kept concealed broke out under the encouragement of McDermott’s infidelity.  The boys of the town flung insults at the priest as he passed.  The people gave little, and that grudgingly.  I could almost feel his pain as he told in his delirium how, day after day, he had dragged his frail body to church and on the round of duty.  But every now and then, as if the words came naturally to bear him up, he would say: 

“’It’s for God’s sake.  I am nothing.  It will all come in His own good time.’

“Then I knew the spirit that kept him to his work.  He went over his visit to me.  How he had hoped, and then how his hopes were dashed to the ground.  Oh, dear Lord, had I known what it all meant to that sensitive, saintly nature, I would have sold my ring and cross to give him what he needed.  But my words seemed to have broken him and he came home to die.  The night of his return he spent before the altar in his log church, and, Saints of Heaven, how he prayed!  When I heard his poor, dry lips whisper over the prayer once more I bowed my head on the coverlet and cried as only a child can cry—­and I was only a child at that minute in spite of my white hair and wrinkles.  He had offered a supreme sacrifice—­his life.  I gleaned from his prayers that his parents had done him the one favor of keeping up his insurance and that he had made it over to his church.  So he wanted to die at his post and piteously begged God to take him.  For his death he knew would