was all. The door shut on them. Forever: so,
good night, Ruth!

He stool there for an hour or two, leaning his head against the muddy
planks, smoking. Perhaps, in his coarse fashion, he took the trouble of
his manhood back to the same God he used to pray to long ago. When he
turned at last, and spoke, it was with a quiet, strong voice, like one
who would fight through life in a manly way. There was a grating sound
at the back of the shed: it was Ben, sawing through the wicket, the
guard having lounged off to supper. Lamar watched him, noticing that the
negro was unusually silent. The plank splintered, and hung loose.

"Done gone, Mars' John, now,"--leaving it, and beginning to replenish
the fire.

"That's right, Ben. We'll start in the morning. That sentry at two
o'clock sleeps regularly."

Ben chuckled, heaping up the sticks.

"Go on down to the camp, as usual. At two, Ben, remember! We will be
free to-night, old boy!"

The black face looked up from the clogging smoke with a curious stare.

"Ki! we'll be free to-night, Mars'!"--gulping his breath.

Soon after, the sentry unlocked the gate, and he shambled off out into
the night. Lamar, left alone, went closer to the fire, and worked busily
at some papers he drew from his pocket: maps and schedules. He intended
to write until two o'clock; but the blaze dying down, he wrapped his
blanket about him, and lay down on the heaped straw, going on sleepily,
in his brain, with his calculations.

The negro, in the shadow of the shed, watched him. A vague fear beset
him,--of the vast, white cold,--the glowering mountains,--of himself;
he clung to the familiar face, like a man drifting out into an unknown
sea, clutching some relic of the shore. When Lamar fell asleep, he
wandered uncertainly towards the tents. The world had grown new,
strange; was he Ben, picking cotton in the swamp-edge?--plunging his
fingers with a shudder in the icy drifts. Down in the glowing torpor of
the Santilla flats, where the Lamar plantations lay, Ben had slept off
as maddening hunger for life and freedom as this of to-day; but here,
with the winter air stinging every nerve to life, with the perpetual
mystery of the mountains terrifying his bestial nature down, the
strength of the man stood up: groping, blind, malignant, it may be; but
whose fault was that? He was half-frozen: the physical pain sharpened
the keen doubt conquering his thought. He sat down in the crusted snow,
looking vacantly a