y, and gain the outside. He descended the narrow stairs, the
prisoner keeping close behind him.

The sheriff inserted the huge iron key into the lock. The rusty bolt
yielded slowly. It still remained for him to pull the door open.

"Stop!" thundered the mulatto, who seemed to divine the sheriff's
purpose. "Move a muscle, and I 'll blow your brains out."

The sheriff obeyed; he realized that his chance had not yet come.

"Now keep on that side of the passage, and go back upstairs."

Keeping the sheriff under cover of the revolver, the mulatto followed
him up the stairs. The sheriff expected the prisoner to lock him into
the cell and make his own escape. He had about come to the conclusion
that the best thing he could do under the circumstances was to submit
quietly, and take his chances of recapturing the prisoner after the
alarm had been given. The sheriff had faced death more than once upon
the battlefield. A few minutes before, well armed, and with a brick wall
between him and them he had dared a hundred men to fight; but he felt
instinctively that the desperate man confronting him was not to be
trifled with, and he was too prudent a man to risk his life against such
heavy odds. He had Polly to look after, and there was a limit beyond
which devotion to duty would be quixotic and even foolish.

"I want to get away," said the prisoner, "and I don't want to be
captured; for if I am I know I will be hung on the spot. I am afraid,"
he added somewhat reflectively, "that in order to save myself I shall
have to kill you."

"Good God!" exclaimed the sheriff in involuntary terror; "you would not
kill the man to whom you owe your own life."

"You speak more truly than you know," replied the mulatto. "I indeed owe
my life to you."

The sheriff started, he was capable of surprise, even in that moment of
extreme peril. "Who are you?" he asked in amazement.

"Tom, Cicely's son," returned the other. He had closed the door and
stood talking to the sheriff through the grated opening. "Don't you
remember Cicely--Cicely whom you sold, with her child, to the speculator
on his way to Alabama?"

The sheriff did remember. He had been sorry for it many a time since. It
had been the old story of debts, mortgages, and bad crops. He had
quarreled with the mother. The price offered for her and her child had
been unusually large, and he had yielded to the combination of anger and
pecuniary stress.

"Good God!" he gasped, "you would n