the patrol returning, weary and
disheartened, protested that he must be lying hid in some gorge of the
purple mountain that overshadowed the town, and would have to be starved
into submission. Meanwhile the usual message ran through the island,
and so admirable were the arrangements which Arthur the reformer had
initiated, that, before noon of the next day, not a signal station on
the coast but knew that No. 8942, etc., etc., prisoner for life, was
illegally at large. This intelligence, further aided by a paragraph in
the Gazette anent the "Daring Escape", noised abroad, the world cared
little that the Mary Jane, Government schooner, had sailed for Port
Arthur without Rufus Dawes.

But two or three persons cared a good deal. Major Vickers, for one, was
indignant that his boasted security of bolts and bars should have been
so easily defied, and in proportion to his indignation was the grief of
Messieurs Jenkins, Scott, and Co., suspended from office, and threatened
with absolute dismissal. Mr. Meekin was terribly frightened at the fact
that so dangerous a monster should be roaming at large within reach of
his own saintly person. Sylvia had shown symptoms of nervous terror,
none the less injurious because carefully repressed; and Captain Maurice
Frere was a prey to the most cruel anxiety. He had ridden off at a
hand-gallop within ten minutes after he had reached the Barracks, and
had spent the few hours of remaining daylight in scouring the country
along the road to the North. At dawn the next day he was away to the
mountain, and with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much of
that wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him. He had
offered to double the reward, and had examined a number of suspicious
persons. It was known that he had been inspecting the prison a few hours
before the escape took place, and his efforts were therefore attributed
to zeal, not unmixed with chagrin. "Our dear friend feels his reputation
at stake," the future chaplain of Port Arthur said to Sylvia at the
Christmas dinner. "He is so proud of his knowledge of these unhappy men
that he dislikes to be outwitted by any of them."

Notwithstanding all this, however, Dawes had disappeared. The fat
landlord of the Star Hotel was the last person who saw him, and the
flying yellow figure seemed to have been as completely swallowed up by
the warm summer's afternoon as if it had run headlong into the blackest
night that ever hung above