rly they would
interpret for him the mystery of his own life. He wakened, again and
again, with the consciousness of having dreamed the most stirring,
amazing dreams, but what they were he couldn't tell. He could only
remember fragments, such as a picture of rushing waters recurring again
and again--and sometimes an amazing horizon, a dark line curiously
notched against a pale green background.

They were not all bad dreams: in reality many of them stirred him and
moved him happily, and he would waken to find the mighty tides of his
blood surging fiercely through the avenues of veins. Evidently they
recalled some happiness that was forgotten. And there was one phase, at
least, of this work in the road gangs that brought him moving, intense
delight. It was merely the sight of the bird life, abounding in the
fields and meadows about the towns.

There had been quite a northern migration lately, these late spring
days. The lesser songsters were already mating and nesting, and he found
secret pleasure in their cheery calls and bustling activity. But they
didn't begin to move him as did the waterfowl, passing in long V-shaped
flocks. That strange, wild wanderer's greeting that the gray geese
called down to their lesser brethren in the meadows had a really
extraordinary effect upon him. It always caught him up and held him,
stirring some deep, strange part of him that he hardly knew existed.
Sometimes the weird, wailing sound brought him quite to the edge of a
profound discovery, but always the flocks sped on and out of hearing
before he could quite grasp it. When the moon looked down, through the
barred window of his cell, he sometimes felt the same way. A great,
white mysterious moon that he had known long ago. It was queer that
there should be a relationship between the gray geese and the cold,
white satellite that rode in the sky. Ben Kinney never tried to puzzle
out what it was; but he always knew it with a knowledge not to be
denied.

The last of the waterfowl had passed by now, but the northern migration
was not yet done. The sun still moved north; warm, north-blowing winds
blew the last of the lowering, wintry clouds back to the Arctic Seas
whence they had come. And because the road work the convicts were doing
brought them, this afternoon, in sight of the railroad right-of-way, Ben
now and then caught sight of other wayfarers moving slowly, but no less
steadily, toward the north. The open road beckoned northward, t