instincts
innate in him, in no way connected with any experience of his immediate
life. Rather it was as if his love for it were a racial love, reaching
back beyond his own life: something inborn in him. It was as if he were
recalling it, not alone from his own past, but from a racial existence a
thousand-thousand years before his own birth. His memory was strangely
stifled, but, oh, he remembered the moon! Forest had spoken of stimuli!
The mere sight of the blue-white beams was the best possible stimulus to
call him to himself.

Ezra Melville and he walked under it, talking little at first, and
mostly the old, blue twinkling eyes watched his face. Seemingly with no
other purpose than to escape the bright glare of the street lights they
walked northward along the docks, below Queen Anne Hill, passed old Rope
Walk, through the suburb of Ballard, finally emerging on the Great
Northern Railroad tracks heading toward Vancouver and the Canadian
border. For all that Ben's long legs had set a fast pace Melville kept
cheerfully beside him throughout the long walk, seemingly without trace
of fatigue.

They paused at last at a crossing, and Ben faced the open fields.
Evidently, before crime had claimed him, he had been deeply sensitive to
nature's beauty. Ezra saw him straighten, his dark, vivid face rise; his
quiet talk died on his lips. Evidently the peaceful scene before him
went home to him very straight. He was very near thralldom from some
quality of beauty that dwelt here, some strange, deep appeal that the
moonlit realm made to his heart.

For the moment Ben had forgotten the old, tried companion at his side.
Vague memories stirred him, trying to convey him an urgent message. He
could all but hear: the sight of the meadows, ensilvered under the moon,
were making many things plain to him which before were shadowed and
vague. The steel rails gleamed like platinum, the tree tops seemed to
have white, molten metal poured on them. It was hard to take his eyes
off those moonlit trees. They got to him, deep inside; thrilling to him,
stirring. Perhaps in his Lost Land the moon shone on the trees this same
way.

There were no prison walls around him to-night. The high buildings
behind him, pressing one upon another, had gone to sustain the feeling
of imprisonment, but it had quite left him now. There were no cold,
watchful lights,--only the moon and the stars and an occasional mellow
gleam from the window of a home. There wa