ed at the
words he had heard and his bloodshot eyes grew dim.

"Go on!" cried the warder with the musket, and the bell began again.

All that day the face of Michael Sunlocks haunted the memory of Red
Jason.

"Who was that man?" he asked of the prisoner who worked by his side.

"How should I know?" the other fellow answered sulkily.

In a space of rest Jason leaned on his shovel, wiped his brow, and
said to his warder, "What was that man's name?"

"A 25," the warder answered moodily.

"I asked for his name," said Jason.

"What's that to you?" replied the warder.

A week went by, and the face of Sunlocks still haunted Jason's
memory. It was with him early and late, the last thing that stood up
before his inward eye when he lay down to sleep, the first thing that
came to him when he awoke; sometimes it moved him to strange laughter
when the sun was shining, and sometimes it touched him to tears when
he thought of it in the night. Why was this? He did not know, he
could not think, he did not try to find out. But there it was, a
living face burnt into his memory--a face so strangely new to him,
yet so strangely familiar, so unlike to anything he had ever yet
seen, and yet so like to everything that was near and dear to
himself, that he could have fancied there had never been a time when
he had not had it by his side. When he put the matter to himself so
he laughed and thought "How foolish." But no self-mockery banished
the mystery of the power upon him of the man's face that he saw for a
moment one morning in the snow.

He threw off his former listlessness and began to look keenly about
him. But one week, two weeks, three weeks passed, and he could
nowhere see the same face again. He asked questions but learned
nothing. His fellow-prisoners began to jeer at him. Upon their souls,
the big red fellow had tumbled into love with the young chap with the
long flaxen hair, and maybe he thought it was a woman in disguise.

Jason knocked their chattering heads together and so stopped their
ribald banter, but his warders began to watch him with suspicion, and
he fell back on silence.

A month passed, and then the chain that was slowly drawing the two
men together suddenly tightened. One morning the order came down from
the office of the Captain that the prisoners' straw beds were to be
taken out into the stockyard and burnt. The beds were not old, but
dirty and damp and full of foul odors. The officers of the settlemen