n, who at that
season--it was winter, and the snow lay thick over the lava streams
and the sand--would adventure so far from home.

And now it was just at this time, after two-and-a-half years in
which no man had seen him or heard of him, that Jason returned to
Reykjavik. Scarce anyone knew him. He was the wreck of himself, a
worn, torn, pitiful, broken ruin of a man. People lifted both hands
at sight of him, but he showed no self-pity. Day after day, night
after night, he frequented the taverns. He drank as he had never
before been known to drink; he laughed as he had never been heard to
laugh; he sang as he had never been heard to sing, and to all outward
appearance he was nothing now but a shameless, graceless, disorderly,
abandoned profligate.

Jorgen Jorgensen heard that Jason had returned, and ordered his
people to fetch him to Government House. They did so, and Jorgen and
Jason stood face to face. Jorgen looked at Jason as one who would
say, "Dare you forget the two men whose lives you have taken?" And
Jason looked back at Jorgen as one who would answer, "Dare you
remember that I spared your own life?" Then, without a word to Jason,
old Jorgen turned to his people and said, "Take him away." So Jason
went back to his dissipations, and thereafter no man said yea or nay
to him.

But when he heard of the despatch, he was sobered by it in a moment,
and when the guards came on their search for a guide to the tavern
where he was, he leapt to his feet and said, "I'll go."

"You won't pass, my lad," said one of the Danes, "for you would be
dead drunk before you crossed the Basket Slope Hill."

"Would I?" said Jason, moodily, "who knows?" And with that he
shambled out. But in his heart he cried, "The hour has come at last!
Thank God! Thank God!"

Before he was missed he had gone from Reykjavik, and made his way to
the desert with his face towards Grimsey.

The next day the guards found their guide and set out on their
journey.

The day after that a Danish captain arrived at Reykjavik from
Copenhagen, and reported to Jorgen Jorgensen that off the Westmann
Islands he had sighted a British man-of-war, making for the northern
shores of Iceland. This news put Jorgen into extreme agitation, for
he guessed at its meaning in an instant. As surely as the war ship
was afloat she was bound for Grimsey, to capture the sloop that lay
there, and as surely as England knew of the sloop, she also knew of
the prisoner whom it wa