ing, coming, coming, then Jason went down to the
Captain of the Mines again.

"I've come, sir," he said, "to ask you to lock me up."

"Why?" said the Captain, "what have you been doing?"

"Nothing," said Jason, "but if you don't prevent me, I'll run away.
This Free Command was bad enough to fear when the snow cut us off
from all the world. But now that it is gone and the world is free,
and the cuckoo is calling, he seems to be calling me, and I must go
after him."

"Go," said the Captain, "and after you've tramped the deserts and
swam the rivers, and slept on the ground, and starved on roots, we'll
fetch you back, for you can never escape us, and lash you as we have
lashed the others who have done likewise."

"If I go," said Jason, defiantly, "you shall never fetch me back, and
if you catch me you shall never punish me."

"What? Do you threaten me?" cried the Captain.

Something in the prisoner's face terrified him, though he would have
scorned to acknowledge his fear, and he straightway directed that
Jason should be degraded, for insolence and insubordination, from the
Free Command to the gangs.

Now this was exactly what Jason wanted, for his heart had grown sick
with longing for another sight of that face which stood up before his
inward eye in the darkness of the night. But remembering Jason's
appeal on behalf of Michael Sunlocks, and his old suspicion regarding
both, the Captain ordered that the two men should be kept apart.

So with Jason in the house by the sea, and Sunlocks in the house by
the lake, the weeks went by; and the summer that was coming came, and
like a bird of passage the darkness of night fled quite away, and the
sun shone that shines at midnight.

And nothing did Jason see of the face that followed him in visions,
and nothing did he hear of the man known to him as A 25, except
reports of brutal treatment and fierce rebellion. But on a day--a
month after he had returned to the stockade--he was going in his
tired and listless way between warders from one solfatara at the foot
of the hill to another on the breast of it, when he came upon a
horror that made his blood run cold.

It was a man nailed by his right hand to a great socket of iron in a
log of driftwood, with food and drink within sight but out of reach
of him, and a huge knife lying close by his side. The man was A 25.

Jason saw everything and the meaning of everything in an instant,
that to get at the food for which he starv