we must be men. The men of our blood
meet not death so."

Immediately the boy slipped from his father's arms and stood erect
and quiet, looking up into the dark face above him watchful for the
next word or sign. The father waved his hand toward the door.

"We now say farewell," he said quietly. He stooped down, kissed
his son gravely and tenderly first upon the lips, then upon the
brow, walked with him to the barred door.

"We are ready," he said quietly to the guard who stood near by.

The boy passed out, and gave his hand to Paulina, who stood waiting
for him.

"Simon Ketzel," said Kalmar, as he bade him farewell, "you will
befriend my boy?"

"Master, brother," said Simon, "I will serve your children with my
life." He knelt, kissed the prisoner's hand, and went out.

That afternoon, the name of Michael Kalmar was entered upon the
roll of the Provincial Penitentiary, and he took up his burden of
life, no longer a man, but a mere human animal driven at the will
of some petty tyrant, doomed to toil without reward, to isolation
from all that makes life dear, to deprivation of the freedom of
God's sweet light and air, to degradation without hope of recovery.
Before him stretched fourteen long years of slow agony, with cruel
abundance of leisure to feed his soul with maddening memories of
defeated vengeance, with fearful anxieties for the future of those
dear as life, with feelings of despair over a cause for which he
had sacrificed his all.

CHAPTER IX

BROTHER AND SISTER

Before summer had gone, Winnipeg was reminded of the existence of
the foreign colony by the escape from the Provincial Penitentiary
of the Russian prisoner Kalmar. The man who could not be held by
Siberian bars and guards found escape from a Canadian prison easy.
That he had accomplices was evident, but who they were could not be
discovered. Suspicion naturally fell upon Simon Ketzel and Joseph
Pinkas, but after the most searching investigation they were released
and Winnipeg went back to its ways and forgot. The big business men
rebuilding fortunes shattered by the boom, the little business men
laying foundations for fortunes to be, the women within the charmed
circle of Society bound to the whirling wheel of social functions,
other women outside and striving to beg, or buy, or break their way
into the circle, and still other women who cared not a pin's head
whether they were within or without, being sufficient for themselves,
t