ugh he had little hope of succeeding. Jack was a stranger to the
better class of business men, and those who did know him were either
friends of the Committee or in deadly fear of it. Still, Bill was
a gambler. He was probably putting the mark of the next victim on
himself; but he did not stop for that.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE OAK

Jack sat looking after the crowd that shuffled through the doorway
into the sunlight. He thought he had believed that he would receive
the sentence which the juryman had spoken so baldly; yet, after the
words had been actually spoken, he stared blankly after Bill and the
others, and incredulously at the Captain, who seated himself upon a
bunk opposite to watch his prisoner, his pistol resting suggestively
upon his knee. The boy lingered to shake Jack's unresponsive hand and
mutter a broken sentence or two of gratitude and sympathy. But Jack
scarcely grasped his meaning, and his answer sounded chillingly calm;
so that the boy, wincing under the cold stare of the Captain and the
seeming indifference of the prisoner, turned away with downy chin
a-tremble and in his eyes the look of horrified awe which sometimes
comes to a youth who has seen death hesitate just over his head, pass
him by, and choose another. In the doorway he stopped and looked back
bewildered. Jack had said that he loved life and would hate to leave
it; and yet he sat there calmly, scraping idly with his boot-toe a
little furrow in the loose sand, his elbows resting on his knees, his
face unlined by frown or bitterness, his eyes bent abstractedly upon
the shallow trench he was desultorily digging. He did not look as the
boy believed a man should look who has just been condemned to die the
ignominious death of hanging. The boy shuddered and went out into
the sunlight, dazed with this glimpse he had got of the inexorable
hardness of life.

Jack did not even know when the boy left. He, also, was looking upon
the hardness of life, but he was looking with the eyes of the fighter.
So long as Jack Allen had breath in his body, he would fight to keep
it there. His incredulity against the verdict swung to a tenacious
disbelief that it would really come to the worst. So long as he
was alive, so long as he could feel the weight of the dagger in his
sleeve, it was temperamentally impossible for him to believe that he
was going to die that day.

Plans he made and smoothed them in the dirt with his toe. If they did
no