. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an
unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is."

The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the
warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed
shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.

"I said the governor has given you a pardon," repeated the warden,
staring hard at him.

"I heered you the fust time," croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out
voice. "When kin I go?"

"Is that all you've got to say?" demanded the warden, bristling up.

"I said, when kin I go?" repeated No. 874.

"Go!--you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!"

The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his
indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he
shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him
crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a
negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him
put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap,
black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy
warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five
dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took
them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate
that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the
inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the
little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went
slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and
sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the
wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.

"Damned savage!" he said to himself. "Didn't even say thank you. I'll
bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a
moccasin snake."

Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later
by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard the
eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from
weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day
coach.

"Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin," the brakeman was
saying to the conductor, "and the smell of the pen all over him. Never
said a word to me--just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up at
the far end of the division, accordin' to the