ioned them closely, cut
off a good many of the items, and gave orders that the other demands
should be complied with, and the guns and ammunition sent off at once
to the various forts, from the great arsenal at the capital.

Dick was depressed at the result of their journey. His hopes had
fallen lower and lower, as, at each fort they visited, he heard the
same story--that all prisoners sent up to the mountain fortresses had,
in a short time, been put to death. It was possible, of course, that
his father might still be at one of the towns where new levies had
been drilled; but he had not, from the first, thought it likely that a
merchant sailor would be put to this work; and had it not been that he
clung to the belief that there was a prisoner at Savandroog, and that
that prisoner was his father, he would have begun to despair.

It was true that there were still many hill forts scattered about the
country, unvisited, but there seemed no reason why any of the
prisoners should have been allowed to survive in these forts, when
they had all been put to death in those they had visited, among which
were the places that had been most used as prisons.

"I would give it up," he said to Surajah, "were it not that, in the
first place, it would almost break my mother's heart. Her conviction
that my father is still alive has never been shaken. It has supported
her all these years, and I believe that, were I to return and tell her
that it was no longer possible to hope, her faith would still be
unshaken. She would still think of him as pining in some dungeon, and
would consider that I had given up the search from faint heartedness.
That is my chief reason. But I own that I am almost as much influenced
by my own conviction that he is in Savandroog. I quite admit that I
can give no reason whatever why, if there is a prisoner there, it
should be my father, and yet I cannot get it out of my mind that it is
he. I suppose it is because I have the conviction that I believe in
it. Why should I have that impression so strongly, if it were not a
true one? I tell myself that it is absurd, that I have no real grounds
to go upon, and yet that does not shake my faith in the slightest. It
is perhaps because we have been so fortunate. Altogether everything
has turned out so favourably, that I can't help thinking he is alive,
and that I shall find him.

"What do you think, Surajah? Ought we to give it up?"

"Why should we?" Surajah replied stoutl