the women and children."

He reached out his hands detainingly, and then drew back as though in
apology for having already kept the great man so long waiting in the
cold. "I wish I could tell you some of the terrible things I have seen,"
he began again, eagerly as Stanton made no movement to depart. "They are
much worse than those you instanced to-night, and you could make so much
better use of them than any one else. I have seen starving women nursing
dead babies, and sometimes starving babies sucking their dead mother's
breasts; I have seen men cut down in the open roads and while digging
in the fields--and two hundred women imprisoned in one room without
food and eaten with small-pox, and huts burned while the people in them
slept--"

The young man had been speaking impetuously, but he stopped as suddenly,
for the senator was not listening to him. He had lowered his eyes
and was looking with a glance of mingled fascination and disgust at
Arkwright's hands. In his earnestness the young man had stretched them
out, and as they showed behind the line of his ragged sleeves the others
could see, even in the blurred light and falling snow, that the wrists
of each hand were gashed and cut in dark-brown lines like the skin of a
mulatto, and in places were a raw red, where the fresh skin had but just
closed over. The young man paused and stood shivering, still holding his
hands out rigidly before him.

The senator raised his eyes slowly and drew away.

"What is that?" he said in a low voice, pointing with a gloved finger at
the black lines on the wrists.

A sergeant in the group of policemen who had closed around the speakers
answered him promptly from his profound fund of professional knowledge.

"That's handcuffs, senator," he said importantly, and glanced at
Stanton as though to signify that at a word from him he would take this
suspicious character into custody. The young man pulled the frayed cuffs
of his shirt over his wrists and tucked his hands, which the cold had
frozen into an ashy blue, under his armpits to warm them.

"No, they don't use handcuffs in the field," he said in the same low,
eager tone; "they use ropes and leather thongs; they fastened me behind
a horse and when he stumbled going down the trail it jerked me forward
and the cords would tighten and tear the flesh. But they have had a long
time to heal now. I have been eight months in prison."

The young men at the carriage window had ceased smil