h officers had taken the place of the Icelanders, the captain of
the mines had released the political prisoners only, and Jason, as a
felon, had been retained. The other prisoners at the mines, some
fifty in all, knew neither Michael Sunlocks nor Red Jason. They were
old criminals from remote districts, sentenced to the jail at
Reykjavik, during the first rule of Jorgen Jorgensen, and sent out to
Krisuvik in the early days of the Republic.

Thus it chanced from the first that though together within a narrow
space of ground Jason and Sunlocks were cut off from all knowledge of
each other such as might have been gleaned from those about them. And
the discipline of the settlement kept them back from that knowledge
by keeping them for many months apart.

The two houses used as workshops and sleeping places were at opposite
sides of the stockade, one at the north, the other at the south; one
overlooking a broad waste of sea, the other at the margin of a dark
lake of gloomy shore. Red Jason was assigned to the house near the
sea, Michael Sunlocks to the house by the lake. These houses were
built of squared logs with earthen floors, and wooden benches for
beds. The prisoners entered them at eight o'clock in the evening, and
left them at five in the morning, their hours of labor in summer
being from five a. m. to eight p. m. They brought two tin cans, one
tin containing their food, their second meal of the day, a pound of
stock fish, and four ounces of bread; the other tin intended for
their refuse of slops and victuals and dirt of other kinds. Each
house contained some twenty-five men and boys, and so peopled and
used they had quickly become grimy and pestilential, the walls
blotched with vermin stains, the floors encrusted with hard trodden
filth that was wet and slippery to the feet, and the atmosphere damp
and foul to the nostrils from the sickening odors of decayed food.

It had been a regulation from the beginning that the latest comer at
each of these houses should serve three months as housekeeper, with
the duty of cleansing the horrible place every morning after his
housemates had left it for their work. During this time he wore the
collar of iron and the bell over his forehead, for it was his period
of probation and of special degradation. Thus Red Jason served as
housekeeper in the house by the sea, while Michael Sunlocks did the
same duty in the house by the lake. Jason went through his work
listlessly, slowly, h