arger than ever before, that gold
had been found in the Yukon, made no difference to Jacques Grassette, for
he was in the condemned cell of Bindon Jail, living out those days which
pass so swiftly between the verdict of the jury and the last slow walk
with the Sheriff.

He sat with his back to the stone wall, his hands on his knees, looking
straight before him. All that met his physical gaze was another stone
wall, but with his mind's eye he was looking beyond it into spaces far
away. His mind was seeing a little house with dormer-windows, and a steep
roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a narrow stoop
in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work done; the
stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread for a family of
twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the fence, to wait the
"fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the sap from the
maple-trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed and spring opened
the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the scythe hard by; the
fields of the little, narrow farm running back from the St. Lawrence like
a riband; and, out on the wide stream, the great rafts with their riverine
population floating down to Michelin's mill-yards.

For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping
each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself
as a little lad, barefooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy,
troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could, and,
with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farm-yard, to be
hitched up in the cariole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur. He
saw himself as a young man back from "the States," where he had been
working in the mills, regarded austerely by little Father Roche, who had
given him his first Communion--for, down in Massachusetts he had learned
to wear his curly hair plastered down on his forehead, smoke bad cigars,
and drink "old Bourbon," to bet and to gamble, and be a figure at
horse-races.

Then he saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him, at
Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the
winter, as boss of a hundred men. He had a way with him, and he had
brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the
lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when
bloodshed seemed certain. Even now the gho