onfession of country faith, the
pitiful man lifted up his eyes from the tiled floor and looked at her
gratefully. His dry lips moved, and he tried to speak.

"Yes," was all he said, with fierce humility. Then the lack of breath
choked him.

"She made me promise not to give you up, and to come and see you. Of
course you are innocent, Ikey?" Abbie did not look at him.

"Yes," he answered mechanically.

"I know," she said softly.

Of what use were more words? They would only beat like waves against
the granite of his broken heart. The two sat silent for a time. Then
Abbie said, "I must go." She edged a little towards him, and touched
his coat.

"When will you come out? I will explain it all to the minister and the
neighbors. We will be married as soon as you come home. She wanted us
to! Oh, Ikey! Oh, Ikey! My poor--poor boy!"

Isaac arose unsteadily. It was time for her to go, for the turnkey had
nodded to him.

A fierce, mad indignation at his fate and what it had wrought upon his
mother and upon his honorable name blinded him. He did not even say
good-by, but left the girl standing in the middle of the guard-room
alone. At any cost he must get back to his cell. Supposing his mind
should give way before he got there? He staggered to the stairway. He
threw his hands up, and groped on the railing. A blindness struck him
before he had mounted two steps. He did not hear a woman's shriek, nor
the rushing of feet, nor the sound of his own fall.

When he awaked, he was alone in the witness cell; and when he put his
white hands to his hair, he felt that his head was shaven. The chipper
prison doctor told him that he was getting nicely over a brain fever.

* * * * *

It was three months after this before the case of Tom Muldoon came
upon the docket. The man whom the saloon-keeper had shot had but just
been declared out of clanger and on the road to recovery.

When the case was called, the district attorney arose from his
desk under the bench, and represented to the court that as for some
unforeseen reason the said Frank Stevens, who had been maliciously and
wilfully assaulted and shot by the said Tom Muldoon, had refused to
prosecute, the prosecution rested upon the government, which would
rely upon the direct evidence of one witness to sustain the case.

The district attorney, who was an unbought man, and whose future
election depended upon the number of convictions he secured for th