re, which caused old Tom, as the road-scraper passed
and repassed the spot, to look very closely down into the upturned dirt.
And it was the glimpse of something in that dirt which caused him
suddenly to rein up the four mules and glance quickly in the direction
of the two guards.

It was an afternoon of terrific heat, following a prolonged drought. In
the road ahead the gang of Negro convicts toiled silently, sluggishly,
in the blinding glare. Simmons had driven off in the direction of
Greenville an hour before. The two remaining guards, with shotguns under
their arms, stood in the scant shade of two dust-covered trees.

"Jake," said the old mountaineer calmly to the Negro on the machine
behind him, the Negro who handled the levers, "Jake, there's a bolt
loose some-whar' on this scrape. Reckon I better 'tend to it myself."

Without any apparent hurry, he clambered down from the seat. Quickly,
secretly, he picked out of the upturned earth an object which he thrust
into his shirt. Deliberately, as if encountering obstacles which caused
him trouble, he hammered away at the supposed loose bolt. When at last
he clambered back into the iron seat, heated like the top of a stove,
there was just a slight flush on his lean cheeks and a brightness as of
triumph in his deep-set eyes.

On the way back to camp they passed Tom Belcher's store. Here he asked
permission of one of the guards (they were not all like Simmons) to go
in and buy himself some tobacco. The guard who went in with him saw
nothing suspicious in the fact that, along with the tobacco, the old man
purchased also a package of chewing gum.

That night he did not sleep. By raising up on his elbows in his cot he
could see, in a chair tilted back against an oak tree, the night guard
with a gun across his knees and, farther on, in front of the guard tent,
the outline of the bloodhound asleep. Once, when he thought the guard
nodded, he reached in his shirt. He got out the object he had picked up
in the road and rubbed it against his shackles. The rasp of file on
steel sounded loud in his tent like an alarm. He thought he saw the
guard stir and the bloodhound lift his head. He lay silently down again.
Later he punched a hole in the mattress and stuck the file deep into the
straw.

Next day he thought of Molly and home. As he sat on the road-scraper the
mountains, purple and lofty against the sky, seemed now to be beckoning
him. Once within them, once across the state