ton, you have shown me many times your friendly sympathy,
and I am again forced to tax your kindness. It is important that I
should see or communicate with Mr. Dunbar within the next forty-eight
hours. Could you induce the telegraph operator here to have a message
delivered to him on the train, before it reaches Washington City?"

"I will certainly do my best; and to insure it I will go to the
railroad operator, who understands the stations, and can catch Dunbar
more easily than a message from the general office. Write our your
telegram, while I order my buggy."

"MR. DUNBAR. On board Train No. 2.

"Please let me see you before you go West. I promise information that
will render you unwilling to make the journey to Bismarck."

"B."

Anxiously she computed the time within which an answer might reasonably
be expected; and her heart dwelt as a suppliant before God, that the
message would avail to arrest pursuit; but hours wore wearily away,
tedious days trod upon the slow skirts of dreary nights; and no
response lifted the burden of dread. Hope whispered feebly that his
failure to send a telegraphic reply, implied his intention of returning
to X---from Philadelphia; and she clung to this rope of sand until a
week had passed. Then the conviction was inevitable that he regarded
her appeal as merely a ruse to divert his course, to delay the seizure
of his prey; and that while he misinterpreted the motive that prompted
her message, she had merely furnished an additional goad to his jealous
hatred.

As helpless wrack borne on the sullen tide of destiny, she struck her
trembling hands together, and cried out in the dark solitude of her
cell: "Verily! The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."

CHAPTER XXV.

The winter was marked by an unusual severity of cold, which prolonged
the rigor of mid-season until late in February, and despite the efforts
of penitentiary officials who made unprecedented requisitions upon the
board of inspectors, for additional clothing, the pent human herd
suffered keenly.

Alarmed by the rapidly increasing rate of sickness within the "walls,"
Mr. Singleton demanded a sanitary commission, which, after apparently
thorough investigation, reported no visible local cause for the
mortality among the convicts; but the germs of disease grew swiftly as
other evil weeds, and the first week in March saw a hideous harvest of
diphtheria of the most malignant type.

At the earliest intima