achine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the
space of three weeks they trickled out one by one. The Deputy
Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen
years of age, and a model son of the prairies. His features were
exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his
mind cool and calculating. He never injured his constitution by any
violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active
life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of
ease and contemplation. If he had any anxiety about the safe custody
of his prisoners he never showed it. He had finished his education,
so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything
else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the
particulars he could impart about the criminals under his care.
There was no fence around the gaol, and Silas kept two of them always
locked in. He "calkilated they wer kinder unsafe." They belonged to
a society of horse thieves whose members were distributed at regular
intervals along the prairies, and who forwarded their stolen animals
by night to Chicago. The two gentlemen in gaol were of an
untrustworthy character, and would be likely to slip away. About a
week after my arrival I met Silas coming out of the gaol, and he said:

"They're gone, be gosh." Silas never wasted words.

"Who is gone?" I inquired.

"Why, them two horse thieves. Just look here."

We went round to the east side of the gaol, and there was a hole
about two feet deep, and just wide enough to let a man through. The
ground underneath the wall was rocky, but the two prisoners had been
industrious, had picked a hole under the wall and had gone through.

"Where's the Sheriff?" I asked. "Won't Mr. Cunningham go after the men?"

"He's away at Bourbonnais' Grove, about suthin' or other, among the
Bluenoses; can't say when he'll be back; it don't matter anyhow. He
might just as well try to go to hell backwards as catch them two
horse thieves now."

Silas had still two other prisoners under his care, and he let them
go outside as usual to enjoy the fresh air. They had both been
committed for murder, but their crime was reckoned a respectable one
compared to the mean one of horse stealing, so Silas gave them
honourable treatment.

One of the prisoners was a widow lady who had killed another lady
with an axe, at a hut near the ca