d fears, when the hospital shed was finished,
and she took her place within it. And now let us see how heaven
fulfilled them.

CHAPTER II.

THE SULPHUR MINES.

Red Jason and Michael Sunlocks were together at last, within the
narrow stockade of a penal settlement. These two, who had followed
each other from land to land, the one on his errand of vengeance, the
other on his mission of mercy, both now nourishing hatred and lust of
blood, were thrown as prisoners into the Sulphur Mines of Krisuvik.
There they met, they spoke, they lived and worked side by side yet
neither knew the other for the man he had sought so long and never
found. This is the strange and wondrous chance that has now to be
recorded, and only to think of it, whether as accident or God's
ordinance, makes the blood to tingle in every vein. Poor and petty
are the passions of man, and God's hand is over all.

The only work of Michael Sunlocks which Jorgen Jorgensen did not undo
in the swift reprisals which followed on the restoration of his power
was the use of the Sulphur Mines as a convict settlement. All he did
was to substitute Danish for Icelandic guards, but this change was
the beginning and end of the great event that followed. The
Icelandic guards knew Red Jason, and if Michael Sunlocks had been
sent out to them they would have known him also, and thus the two men
must have soon known each other. But the Danish warders knew nothing
of Jason, and when they brought out Michael Sunlocks they sent the
Icelandic guards home. Thus Jason never heard that Michael Sunlocks
was at the Sulphur Mines, and though in the whirl of many vague
impressions, the distant hum of a world far off, there floated into
his mind the news of the fall of the Republic he could never suspect,
and there was no one to tell him, that the man whom he had pursued
and never yet seen, the man he hated and sought to slay, was a
convict like himself, working daily and hourly within sight and sound
of him.

Michael Sunlocks, on his part, knew well that Red Jason had been sent
to the Sulphur Mines; but he also knew that he had signed Jason's
pardon and ordered his release. More than this, he had learned that
Jorgen Jorgensen had liberated all who had been condemned by the
Republic, and so he concluded that Jason had become a free man when
he himself became a prisoner. But there had been a delay in the
despatch of Jason's pardon, and when the Republic had fallen and the
Danis