aughter taunting him in
his folly.

He went back to his cot, and in his despair buried his face in his
hands. In the half-hour after that he did not raise his head. For the
first time in his life he knew that he was beaten, so utterly beaten
that he no more had the desire to fight, and his soul was dark with the
chaos of the things he had lost.

At last he opened his eyes to the blackness of his prison room, and he
beheld a marvelous thing. Across the gloom of the cell lay a shaft of
golden fire. It was the light of the rising moon coming through his
little, steel-barred window. To Kent it had crept into his cell like a
living thing. He watched it, fascinated. His eyes followed it to the
foot-square aperture, and there, red and glorious as it rose over the
forests, the moon itself filled the world. For a space he saw nothing
but that moon crowding the frame of his window. And as he rose to his
feet and stood where his face was flooded in the light of it, he felt
stirring within him the ghosts of his old hopes. One by one they rose
up and came to life. He held out his hands, as if to fill them with the
liquid glow; his heart beat faster in that glory of the moonrise. The
taunting murmur of the river changed once more into hopeful song, his
fingers closed tightly around the bars, and the fighting spirit rose in
him again. As that spirit surged stronger, beating down his despair,
driving the chaos out of his brain, he watched the moon as it climbed
higher, changing from the red of the lower atmosphere to the yellow
gold of the greater heights, marveling at the miracle of light and
color that had never failed to stir him.

And then he laughed. If Pelly or Carter had heard him, they would have
wondered if he was mad. It was madness of a sort--the madness of
restored confidence, of an unlimited faith, of an optimism that was
bound to make dreams come true. Again he looked beyond the bars of his
cell. The world was still there; the river was there; all the things
that were worth fighting for were there. And he would fight. Just how,
he did not try to tell himself now. And then he laughed again, softly,
a bit grimly, for he saw the melancholy humour of the fact that he had
built his own prison.

He sat down again on the edge of his cot, and the whimsical thought
struck him that all those he had brought to this same cell, and who had
paid the first of their penance here, must be laughing at him now in
the spirit way. In his