ads the whistle
of birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl. The tender sap of
youth was in this glowing and alert new world, and, by sudden contrast
with the prison walls which he had just left behind, the earth seemed
recreated, unfamiliar, compelling and companionable. Strange that in all
the years that had been since he had gone back to his abandoned home to
find Marcile gone, the world had had no beauty, no lure for him. In
the splendour of it all, he had only raged and stormed, hating his
fellowman, waiting, however hopelessly, for the day when he should see
Marcile and the man who had taken her from him. And yet now, under the
degradation of his crime and its penalty, and the unmanning influence of
being the helpless victim of the iron power of the law, rigid, ugly and
demoralising--now with the solution of his life's great problem here
before him in the hills, with the man for whom he had waited so long
caverned in the earth, but a hand-reach away, as it were, his wrongs had
taken a new manifestation in him, and the thing that kept crying out in
him every moment was, Where is Marcile?

It was four o'clock when they reached the pass which only Grassette
knew, the secret way into the Gulch. There was two hours' walking
through the thick, primeval woods, where few had ever been, except the
ancient tribes which had once lorded it here; then came a sudden drop
into the earth, a short travel through a dim cave, and afterward a sheer
wall of stone enclosing a ravine where the rocks on either side nearly
met overhead.

Here Grassette gave the signal to shout aloud, and the voice of the
Sheriff called out: "Hello, Bignold!

"Hello! Hello, Bignold! Are you there?--Hello!" His voice rang out clear
and piercing, and then came a silence-a long, anxious silence. Again the
voice rang out: "Hello! Hello-o-o! Bignold! Bigno-o-ld!"

They strained their ears. Grassette was flat on the ground, his ear
to the earth. Suddenly he got to his feet, his face set, his eyes
glittering.

"He is there beyon'--I hear him," he said, pointing farther down the
Gulch. "Water--he is near it."

"We heard nothing," said the Sheriff, "not a sound." "I hear ver' good.
He is alive. I hear him--so," responded Grassette; and his face had a
strange, fixed look which the others interpreted to be agitation at the
thought that he had saved his own life by finding Bignold--and alive;
which would put his own salvation beyond doubt.

He broke a