. Carter had slipped a pair of irons on him, and the
starlight glinted on the shining steel. Sands was bending over Mercer,
and Carter was saying in a low voice:

"It's too bad, Kent. But I've got to do it. I saw you from the window
just as Mercer screamed. Why did you stop for _him_?"

Mercer was getting up with the assistance of Sands. He turned a bloated
and unseeing face toward Kent and Carter. He was blubbering and
moaning, as though entreating for mercy in the fear that Kent had not
finished with him. Carter pulled Kent away.

"There's only one thing for me to do now," he said. "It isn't pleasant.
But the law says I must take you to barracks."

In the sky Kent saw the stars clearly again, and his lungs were
drinking in the cool air as in the wonderful moments before his
encounter with Mercer.

He had lost. And it was Mercer who had made him lose. Carter felt the
sudden tightening of his muscles as he walked with a hand on his arm.
And Kent shut his teeth close and made no answer to what Carter had
said, except that Carter heard something which he thought was a sob
choked to death in the other's throat.

Carter, too, was a man bred of the red blood of the North, and he knew
what was in Kent's heart. For only by the breadth of a hair had Kent
failed in his flight.

Pelly was on duty at barracks, and it was Pelly who locked him in one
of the three cells behind the detachment office. When he was gone, Kent
sat down on the edge of his prison cot and for the first time let the
agony of his despair escape in a gasping breath from between his lips.
Half an hour ago the world had reached out its arms to him, and he had
gone forth to its welcome, only to have the grimmest tragedy of all his
life descend upon him like the sword of Damocles. For this was real
tragedy. Here there was no hope. The tentacles of the law had him in
their grip, and he could no longer dream of escape.

Ghastly was the thought that it was he, James Kent, who had supervised
the building of these cells! Acquainted with every trick and stratagem
of the prisoner plotting for his freedom, he had left no weak point in
their structure. Again he clenched his hands, and in his soul he cursed
Mercer as he went to the little barred window that overlooked the river
from his cell. The river was near now. He could hear the murmur of it.
He could see its movement, and that movement, played upon by the stars,
seemed now a writhing sort of almost noiseless l