oughtful, melancholy, as if his ancestors,
pondering through the centuries on the frailty of humanity as they saw
it, had set their indelible stamp of gloom and sorrow on his face.
Toward him the burly guard and the tall bearded prisoner made their way.

There are men to whom no dog can be insensible; men with a secret
quality of magnetism or understanding which makes any dog, at their
approach, look up. When Simmons passed the great hound did not stir;
but when Tom Abercrombie came opposite him, he lifted his muzzle,
grizzled with age, and his melancholy, amber-coloured eyes met the
man's.

The old man stopped. It was as if he had found, in all this strangeness,
a friend. He spoke before he thought--half under his breath.

"Old Whiskers," he said gently. "Old Gray Whiskers."

Simmons turned in a flash, his face suddenly more crimson than ever, his
eyes blazing.

"What did you say to that dog?" he yelled.

The old man looked at him steadily but did not reply.

"Now here!" The guard's voice rang out in the grove. "I know you,
Abercrombie, and I know your game, you bloody, long-whiskered,
knife-totin' throat-cutter. You are tryin' to make friends with that
dog!"

He went to a near-by bush, got out his knife, and cut a heavy switch.

"Take this," he commanded. "Oh, you can catch hold of it! Catch it with
both hands. Never mind the bracelets. Take it. Hit that dog. Hit him!"

The dreamlike state in which the old man had been wandering dissolved.
His eyes narrowed to mere slits behind the beetling brows. The cold
steel of the mountaineer, the mountaineer who weighs his words, was in
the slow-drawled reply:

"Wal, now, I reckon I won't."

A moment they faced one another, Simmons' eyes murderous. Some fear of
an investigation if he struck the old man, something daunting, too, that
he saw in the mountaineer's eyes, restrained him.

"Abercrombie," he said, and moistened his lips with his tongue, "I
brought out in that car three boxes of shotgun shells--buckshot--extra
heavy loaded. Get me?"

Such was the initiation of old Tom Abercrombie as a convict. That
afternoon he was entered on the books as a "dangerous" prisoner; that
night he lay on an iron cot, staring up at the roof of a solitary tent,
which, according to law, had to be provided for him. On his ankles were
locked two steel anklets connected by a chain eighteen inches long. This
chain, in turn, was locked to the cot.

Shame lay with him as he stared u