full of delight in his success, he felt that he had earned it,
and waited for his joyful holiday with the impatience of a boy.

Dan meantime was also counting the weeks till August, when he would
be free. But neither marriage-bells nor festival music awaited him; no
friends would greet him as he left the prison; no hopeful prospect lay
before him; no happy home-going was to be his. Yet his success was far
greater than Nat's, though only God and one good man saw it. It was
a hard-won battle; but he would never have to fight so terrible a
one again; for though enemies would still assail from within and from
without, he had found the little guide-book that Christian carried in
his bosom, and Love, Penitence, and Prayer, the three sweet sisters, had
given him the armour which would keep him safe. He had not learned to
wear it yet, and chafed against it, though he felt its value, thanks to
the faithful friend who had stood by him all that bitter year.

Soon he was to be free again, worn and scarred in the fray, but out
among men in the blessed sun and air. When he thought of it Dan felt as
if he could not wait, but must burst that narrow cell and fly away,
as the caddis-worms he used to watch by the brookside shed their stony
coffins, to climb the ferns and soar into the sky. Night after night he
lulled himself to sleep with planning how, when he had seen Mary Mason
according to his promise, he would steer straight for his old friends,
the Indians, and in the wilderness hide his disgrace and heal his
wounds. Working to save the many would atone for the sin of killing
one, he thought; and the old free life would keep him safe from the
temptations that beset him in cities.

'By and by, when I'm all right again, and have something to tell that
I'm not ashamed of, I'll go home,' he said, with a quicker beat of the
impetuous heart that longed to be there so intensely, he found it as
hard to curb as one of his unbroken horses on the plains. 'Not yet. I
must get over this first. They'd see and smell and feel the prison taint
on me, if I went now, and I couldn't look them in the face and hide
the truth. I can't lose Ted's love, Mother Bhaer's confidence, and the
respect of the girls, for they did respect my strength, anyway; but now
they wouldn't touch me.' And poor Dan looked with a shudder at the brown
fist he clenched involuntarily as he remembered what it had done since
a certain little white hand had laid in it confidingly. 'I