got his own extra, and when he came up again and called for yours the
captain, thinking it was you, gave it to him. There was no intention on
the captain's part to rob you."

The convict gasped and leaned forward eagerly.

"Until the receipt of this letter," resumed the warden, "I had opposed
the movement which had been started for your pardon; but when this
letter came I recommended your pardon, and it has been granted.
Besides, you have a serious heart trouble. So you are now discharged
from the prison."

The convict stared and leaned back speechless. His eyes shone with a
strange, glassy expression, and his white teeth glistened ominously
between his parted lips. Yet a certain painful softness tempered the
iron in his face.

"The stage will leave for the station in four hours," continued the
warden. "You have made certain threats against my life." The warden
paused; then, in a voice that slightly wavered from emotion, he
continued: "I shall not permit your intentions in that regard--for I
care nothing about them--to prevent me from discharging a duty which,
as from one man to another, I owe you. I have treated you with a
cruelty the enormity of which I now comprehend. I thought I was right.
My fatal mistake was in not understanding your nature. I misconstrued
your conduct from the beginning, and in doing so I have laid upon my
conscience a burden which will embitter the remaining years of my life.
I would do anything in my power, if it were not too late, to atone for
the wrong I have done you. If, before I sent you to the dungeon, I
could have understood the wrong and foreseen its consequences, I would
cheerfully have taken my own life rather than raised a hand against
you. The lives of us both have been wrecked; but your suffering is in
the past,--mine is present, and will cease only with my life. For my
life is a curse, and I prefer not to keep it."

With that the warden, very pale, but with a clear purpose in his face,
took a loaded revolver from a drawer and laid it before the convict.

"Now is your chance," he said, quietly: "no one can hinder you."

The convict gasped and shrank away from the weapon as from a viper.

"Not yet--not yet," he whispered, in agony.

The two men sat and regarded each other without the movement of a
muscle.

"Are you afraid to do it?" asked the warden.

A momentary light flashed in the convict's eyes.

"No!" he gasped; "you know I am not. But I can't--not yet,--not yet."