was expected to yield at _least_ ten per cent. on the money
invested by the lessees.

So Jim went to the coal mines in the mountains, leaving his life, his
poor, puny sixteen years of dust and degradation, behind him. If there
was anything of brightness, any softening memory, any tender touch of
the human--_dream_ touches are they to the castaway--which Jim carried
with him, it was the memory of old Nance, drunken, filthy, murderous
old Nance, and the face of the gray-bearded warden who had lifted his
voice in his behalf.

It was noon of a day in June, early in the eighties, that Jim trudged
across the coal-sprinkled ridge upon which rose the great gray,
weather-beaten, rat-infested fence, which was dignified by the name of
stockade. To go out of life into a dungeon like that, and at noon of a
day in June. That Jim made no sign was accredited to his hardness of
heart. That, having registered and heard an official sneer at the
name, Jim Royal, and having passed through the hands of the barber,
and being duly entered at last among the State's hired help, and
dropped down on his ill-smelling bunk, a rat came and gnawed his ear,
and the vermin crawled unmolested over him, and still he gave no sign,
was set down to the account of his laziness.

"He won't be vicious," the warden said, "he is too lazy," and he
thought yearningly of the raw-hide lash hanging in the office. That
the stupor might be the result of weariness had never once suggested
itself. If it had, why still there was the lash. The lessees' ten _per
cent_. must be gotten out of that herd in the stockade, even if it
should be necessary to beat it out.

But when, the next morning, Jim fell into his place as brisk as any,
the warden began to waver between the lash and the pool. If he did not
need the one, he was fairly seen to require the other. All of them
needed some one, may be two, of the prison's medicines, and the warden
made a special point of spying out the diseases of new arrivals, and
applying the remedy as soon as possible. It told them, more plainly
than words, precisely the manner of treatment they were to expect in
case of any appearance of any of the several moral diseases with which
all convicts, young, old, rich, or poor, were supposed to be
afflicted.

Therefore, the warden "had his eye on Jim." And when the gang started
from the stockade across the black, coal-dusted mountains, to the
blacker mine beneath, he called to the new arrival, dra