Larcom's Little Chap

THE military prison at Finchley was very much like the rest, I suppose. Larcom was one of a lot of twenty or thirty who had come in together more than a year before. He was a big, common-looking fellow, not very clever, and pretty rough. Brown was from the same neighborhood, and he and Larcom were mates all through. He was a sharp little fellow, this Brown, quicktempered and wiry, and might have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty. He would have been free or dead long before that, but for sticking by his hulking comrade, — Larcom rather anchored him. Luce was a sergeant in the twenty-third, when taken; he had been a mere boy two years before, but he was not a boy now, and he looked as though a little more of the same sort would make him neither boy nor man.

Larcom had been married to a German woman a short time before his second enlistment, and just before their capture he had received news of the birth of a child. Everybody knew about his Katy and the boy, and by this time there was not much left of the letter that had brought the news. He liked to talk about them, and the men liked to hear him in that dismal place; laughed at him, and poked weak fun at him. He had plenty of leisure to think about his wife and child, and he thought and talked so constantly of them that he gradually built up a kind of romance about both, but principally about the child, perhaps from there being less troublesome ground-work of fact to clear away and accommodate. He knew no more about it than his audience, but he came to more than half believe in the description and history he gave of the little one he had never seen. The fellows made a standing joke of asking after the baby’s health, his weight, and the number of his teeth, and absorbing interest and sympathy were manifested in critical periods of measles and whooping-cough.

The fun was weak, no doubt, and not too fine-drawn. That was in the first months of their imprisonment. By and by they ceased to quiz Larcom, partly because he took it less and less kindly, and partly because they came to have small stomach for pleasantry themselves. There was only one thing that made the life tolerable at all, and that was the hope of escape. And they never ceased to plot and plan for that. Some got away, by dexterous and instant use of fortunate chance, by desperate defiance of risk and reason, by stratagem devised and worked out with incredible means and success. But most of the plots were discovered at Finchley, by the cunning of one of the guards. He was a low, brutal fellow, with a retreating chin and forehead, and a peculiar leer for his ordinary expression. This fellow had a habit of snapping his jaws convulsively when he laughed, and from that and his ferret keenness of scent and success in unearthing tunneling plots and the like, he had got the nickname of “ Steel-trap,” and was known by no other. The hatred of the prisoners for this man was simply murderous, and the best of the guards themselves despised him. His ingenuity in thwarting attempts at escape were beyond belief, and his enjoyment of success quite inhuman. During the progress of the great tunnel of July, which was dug with infinite patience and skill and with the most elaborate caution and secrecy, he was watched by a regular system of espionage, and when the men lay down on the night of the twentieth of July to wait with fear and trembling for the signal, not a man of them believed Trap had any suspicion, and twenty-one men passed through that hundred feet of burrow that night. The twenty-second was Baker, who had sworn he would never come back alive. He thought he heard some strange noise when Whitelaw went out just ahead of him, and when he emerged and saw the hated leering face and more armed men behind, he leaped on the guard with a terrible curse, and the next minute lay dying on the grass. The rest were all taken quietly as they came out, and passed back in at the gates, with what bitterness may be imagined.

Larcom ceased altogether to talk of the child and its mother after a while, and got to be very quiet indeed, and towards the end of the year he brooded a good deal. One Thursday morning very early, those lying near him who were awake heard him swearing to himself. Then he turned over to Brown, who lay next him, and said: —

“ Browny, I want to see her and the little chap.”

Then he turned away his face and lay there a long while quite still. That afternoon, as Satan would have it, Luce, Brown, and Larcom were detailed upon parole to bring water from a spring outside the walls. Wells were low from the long drought. They had a barrel upon a hand-cart, and a pail apiece, and went in and out several times. The spring was out of sight of the gates, about a quarter of a mile to the west. It ran out of a trough at the roadside in a bend of the fence and behind a clump of bushes. They were neither of them too strong, and water is not so light as some things. It was nearly sunset when they came to the spring the last time. Larcom filled his pail and then stood up and poured it out on the ground.

“Boys,” he said, “I ain’t going to carry any more. I ’m going home.” The quiet words fired Brown like a match to powder. He sprang up and flung away the pail he was filling.

“ Come on,” he cried fiercely, “ I’m —if I ’ll go back to that hell! ”

Luce sat on the edge of the cart, and looked down at his toes working in and out of his shoes. Like enough he did not see either just then; talking of home made a baby of him.

“Are you coming, Luce?” Larcom asked. And Luce looked up and answered , —

“ No.”

“That’s right, Luce,” Larcom said; “I’m glad you ain’t. But I can’t stand it any longer. Tell the boys I could n’t, Luce. Take care of yourself. Good-by.”

He gave a quick, hard grip of the hand, and Luce said, —

“ Good-by, boys. I hope you’ll get through.”

He turned his back and put down his head, where he heard nothing but the splash of the water in the pail. It had run three or four times full before he got up, and then there was no one in sight. He filled the barrel alone. Then he sat down and waited for some one to come. When some of the guard came running after a while and demanded where were his companions, and which way they had gone, he answered that he did n’t know.

The feeling in the prison toward the two fugitives, when it was known that they had broken parole and run, was no kind one. It was an additional straw upon backs already bowed to breaking; it put a taunt into every look and word of their hated keepers, and made more intolerable and hopeless the life of every man within the loathed walls, and removed further from each the light of the hope of escape.

A week or two after that the news was passed through the wards one afternoon that Larcom had been brought cack, and was then in the hospital across the yard. A day or two later, Doctor Farmer came up into Larcom’s old ward on the third floor. Farmer was one of the prisoners; being a doctor of skill and experience, and doctors being scarce, the commander had put him in charge of the hospital in the place. He sat down and beckoned to some of the men, and they came round to hear what he had to say, but without any quickness or eagerness, and in a stolid, silent, dogged way that had become the dismal habit of the place.

“ Boys,” the grave doctor began, perhaps a little graver than usual, “ you know who we’ve got in the hospital now? ” Nobody answered, and some of them turned away and muttered.

“ Look here, boys,” he went on, “ I’m as sick of this as you are; I want to get away as bad as any of you. Storrs and I could have had a good deal of liberty, and gone out and in about as we pleased these last six months, if we ’d given our word not to run, but we would n’t do it. I know how you feel about this. He ’ll be back with you in a few days; he’s nearly starved to death and has a cut on his head. He was quite crazed when they brought him in, and maybe he was a little wrong before he went, with thinking so much about his wife and the little fellow he has never seen. You must n’t be rough on him when he comes up.”

Larcom came up one morning, and back to his old bunk. They meant not to be unfriendly with him, and Dexter met him and gave his hand and said, —

“ Come in, old man. How d’ do, Lark ? We ’re glad you’ve come back. ’’

The double meaning of the words was no less evident for being unintentional, and the welcome on the whole was not a pleasant one. They meant to make allowance for him, but they were too low. They were so close to the wall that they could not see more than their own side, and not much of that. He was ghastly to look at, his face white, fallen in, his eyes a little wild yet, his clothes hanging shapelessly over his bones, and his head bound with a cloth. He crept away to his old bunk and lay there most of the next three days. That crowded room was more terribly lonely to him than any wilderness. At the end of three days he went and begged the officers of the guard to put him in some other place, and they had mercy on him and put him below. And though it was a far worse place, and the old one was by no means pleasant, he was thankful to creep away and hide his head anywhere out of sight. He had turned his hand against every man of them, and every man’s hand and heart was against him, whether they smiled or looked black, He had thought his lot and theirs too hard to be borne before; now he envied them. The common sympathy and confidence in one another, of which he had never thought before, seemed inestimable things now, as he slunk away to his dungeon. His was a prison within a prison. He kept apart from all, was shut up within himself; in that dreadful loneliness he devoured his soul with brooding and yearnings that had no escape in spoken words. He went back to the hospital after a while and brooded there, and the doctors knew that he must soon die or go mad.

One afternoon in October, a short, thick, sturdy little German woman came to the gate of the prison, carrying a year-old child in her arms. She looked worn, and her dress was soiled and ragged, and she walked in her slow, flat, Dutch way, like one who had come a long distance. She asked in her broken English if that was Finchley military prison, and if John Larcom was there confined.

“ I reckon he is,” was the answer. “You’ve come to the right number.”

And to her demand to see him, the answer was bluntly given that it was contrary to rules, and could by no means be done.

The guard was a lank, straddling fellow, and he ambled his six steps back and forth across the gate with an attempt at a soldierly carriage.

“I haf drafel nigh tousand mile,” the woman said in her slow, stolid way. “ I haf walk, unt mit garry mein papy, more as dree hoontret mile. He is mein mon. I must to see him.”

“It ain’t no use, ma’am,” the guard said. “ Nobody gets in or out of here. Don’t say no more. Go along now, that’s a good woman.” And the big sentinel straddled on back and forth.

Katy looked after him a minute or two, and then sat down on a stone and waited. She did not despair; that was her journey’s end; she never thought of going back. As she sat there, Trap came out. He stopped when he saw her, and quizzed the long-legged guard.

“ This your youngest, Staples? Nice cub; looks like you.”

There was plainly no love lost on its way from Staples to Trap; the guard scowled and turned away his head, and marched back and forth, forgetting to be awkward in the dignity of scorn. Trap turned to the woman then, and she stood up and told him the same story. Trap seemed not to notice what she said, much; he was bending forward grinning to the child, and he chucked him under the chin, and said, —

“Chucky, chucky! Larcom’s kid, hey? Bow wow, gobble, gobble!” snapping his jaws and grinding his teeth in mock fierceness. “ First young son of a Yank I ever see.” And he leered close to the child, and made hideous grimaces in his face. The mother clasped the child tighter, and drew back a step. But he was a bold little fellow; he scowled back, and glanced at his mother as much as to say, Don’t be afraid, and struck the grinning face with his clenched little fist, and gripped his little fingers in the man’s beard.

“ The little devil ! ” cried Trap. “Lord, ain’t he spunky, though!”

Katy looked a little alarmed, and the guard stopped and put in, —

. “ Say, now, you Trap, let up on that now. You better mosy now; you had.”

“ Oh, you choke, Staples,” Trap answered; and more that was not of the kind that turns away wrath, and need not be repeated here; but he moved out of reach of the long guard’s bayonet.

Woman and child were dusty and hot-looking. Trap turned and asked her abruptly if she did n’t want some cold water. Staples knew Trap was upon some trick with her then, and he warned her against him bluntly enough.

“ If you want to drink, and wash the young one,” Trap said, “I '11 show you the place.” He stood facing her, with his back to the guard, as he spoke, and she looked at him a minute, then turned and went with him. They turned the angle of the prison-walls, and walked along the road to the west a quarter of a mile, turned out through a fringe of bushes that hid the road, and found a spring splashing out of a bank through a trough. He did not speak all the way. She took a tin cup from her pocket, and Trap lay down on the grass and watched her washing the child’s and her own hands and face, and the little fellow drinking with his face in the cup, and his two hands gripping it hard. Trap moved round and held his head under the spout, and let the cool water dash upon his head, shaking it like a dog at first, and then lying still and grimacing out of the shower-bath at the child. Katy paid no heed, but stolidly mopped the water from the little neck and face. The baby stared fixedly at Trap a while, after the solemn manner of his kind, and then broke into one broad smile, at which the fellow grimaced and snapped his teeth more hideously than ever. Then he came out of the waterfall, and shook the water from his eyes.

“ Now then,” he said to Katy, “ tell us all about it.”

In her grave, even, stolid way, she told him her little story. Larcom had bought her a poor little shanty and a good bit of garden ground with his bounty and what he had saved, by a northern country roadside. There she had lived, and there her little boy was born. She had not wanted; she raised a good many vegetables on the bit of ground, and the towns-people did not forget the soldiers’ wives. She was hoeing among her cabbages one morning, when a ragged, hungry - looking stranger came to the fence and asked if her name was Katy. He said his name was Brown, and he told her how her John had broken away, and tried to come to her.

“It was py der spring, wasser like das, he say to me, dot mein Chon say he can not longer to wait,” she said, and looked up at Trap, inquiring. The child had slid down from his mother’s lap and sat in the grass bolt upright, his baby eyes staring unwinkingly in Trap’s face. Trap was holding down a branch of a bush over the little fellow s head, to keep off the sun, looking at him and listening to the woman’s quiet talk. He looked up and answered then,—

“ Jes so, ma'am. This yere’s the spot.”

The child’s staring eyes shut down after a little, and he lay over and fell fast asleep with his head on the soldier’s arm. Trap curled down beside him, without moving his arm, and held the branch lower so that it hid the two faces that were so very far apart.

Katy went on with her story. Brown told her how he had escaped and her husband had been wounded, taken, and fetched back. She took Brown in when he had done and gave him some food, and ate herself, and fed the child. When Brown was rested and started out, she came out too, and locked the door. Brown asked her what she was going to do.

“ I go to Chon,” she answered. With her child in her arms, without money or friends, calmly and undoubtingly, this stolid, slow-witted German woman set out to go a thousand miles. He had tried to come to her and his child and could not; then they must go to him. That was all. She did not hurry or fret; if she went wrong, she turned back as calmly as she had come. She had infinite patience and endurance, unwavering purpose and the faith that removes mountains. Almost everywhere she got help for the asking. They gave her a free ride on the railroads most of the way to the scene of war. By the same untiring persistence she got herself passed beyond the lines and into the enemy’s country. It made no difference to her whose ground it was; it was to be got over, that was all. She used no artifice whatever; everywhere she had the one story to tell, —

“I go to mein raon. He is in milidaire ehail. He was dry to me come, he is cut on de het, he will die und not to see his papy. I must to him come.”

Her simplicity was better than any art; she had nothing to hide, no part to play, no disguise to maintain. They asked her if she was this and that.

“ I know not de bolidick, vas es is,” she answered. “ I am not dis und someding else, I only poor Detch woman, und I go to mein mon in milidaire chail. You will not to me stop?”

No one did stop her long; almost no men and very few women gave her hard looks or words. She walked on day after day with a patience and pertinacity almost sublime. She carried nothing with her but a tin cup and maybe a cake or a slice for the child. They never lay down hungry but twice or thrice, and then they were lost in the wild country, away from any house. The two won hearts wherever they came; they were doubly armed. Men were kind to the woman ; women were kind to the child.

Heat, cold, dust, rain, hunger, weariness, kindness, and cruelty; hard, bare, and desolate lodging; these were the daily incidents through which she went sturdily, stolidly trudging southward by the week together. They made little figure in her narrative to Trap, but he knew them all, nevertheless. And all the while she talked, the child lay placidly sleeping in the shadow on the grass, with his cheek on the soldier’s arm. Trap let the branch swing up then, and showed himself coiled ungainly by the boy and chewing a great cud of leaves and grass.

“ I had a chap like him once,” he said, without any special expression in his face, and putting one finger on the child’s cheek. “ He’s dead, and I’m glad of it. His mother would n’t walk ten rods to keep me from being hung.”

He got up and went away without another word. A few minutes later he came slouching in at the prison gate, leering savagely at long Staples with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and the sentry turned away his head and would have liked to run him through with his bayonet on the spot. Trap crossed the prison yard and entered the rickety out-building which had been made the hospital. There were plenty in the place, desperate and desolate enough; but Trap saw at a glance that his usual luck was with him. There were none of the guards within. Storrs, the dispenser of medicines, and one or two other attendants from the prisoners, were all beside the sick. He pushed through, to the far end where Larcom lay, alone in that crowded house of misery. His face was turned to the wall, and he did not look or move. Trap took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.

“ Now then, you dam Yank,” he said, “ do you want to see your Dutch Kate and her young one? ”

The prisoner turned over with a single motion as if an electric shock had struck him.

“ She ’s walked from home to see you. She ’s the biggest fool God ever made,” the fellow went on. And he sneered. “If I let you out to see her, you ’ll come, back again, won’t you? ”

“ I will,” was the low reply. “ God help you, if you ’re hoaxing me! ”

“ Speak for yourself,” Trap snarled. “ I don’t want no help.” He threw off his cap and coat. “ Get up and put them on,” he commanded. Larcom did not stop to think whether he was able or not. He got up and put on the hat and coat. Trap fished out a pair of boots and trousers from under the rude bed, and bade him put them on. He did not care much who saw or heard him; if he had taken a prisoner’s arm and walked him out of the gate in broad day, it would have been an even chance whether the guards would have stopped them or said Trap was up to some new deviltry, and the Yanks had best lie low. Now it was dusk and he knew there was no one there who would interfere. The boots had fitted Larcom once; he put his feet into what was left of them without any need of pulling.

“ They ’re at Kirby’s spring; you ought to know it,” the brutal guard sneered again. “ Now git! ”

Larcom marched out and across the yard. Staples was still on guard at the gate. He recognized Trap’s coat and cap as they came near, and turned his back. The uniforms of the guards had reached that degree of tatters and patches that they had acquired an individuality easily recognized. Larcom walked out at the gate and round the angle of the walls, and was a free man once more. You and I must have the like experience (and I pray God that neither we nor any ever may again), before I can tell or you understand what, those words mean. In five minutes more the battered fellow is where we will not follow him. But we may picture him lying among the bushes, the stolid woman whose love and faith have conquered all things for his sake mourning and rejoicing brokenly over him. And he has the little chap at last, pressed ever so close to his heart.

Night settled down upon Finchley prison one evening after its desolate fashion. Just at dusk there came walking up the stairs and into the old ward a man in the uniform of the guards. He crossed the room to Brown’s and Larcom’s old bunk and sat down. The places were vacant, and had been since the two men left. The prisoners drew away from the stranger, talking together sullenly and looking over their shoulders at him with no friendly faces. Then Dexter strode up to him and spoke.

“Now then, you Reb, what do you want here? Move on now, or you ’ll get hove out. ”

The stranger took off his cap and showed his face, about as ghastly and deathlike as ever walked on feet. He smiled in their angry faces, and said,—

“ It’s only me, it ain’t no Reb. Don't you know me, Billy? ”

And Dexter cried out, “By Judas, it’s old Lark. How are you, Lark? ” and he offered his hand.

But Larcom put it away weakly. “ Thank y’, Billy; not just yet. Wait till I tell y’ how ’t is. Come around, boys, and give me a chance; I ’m about played out. Boys, I went back on to you that time, and you was pretty heavy on me, and I don’t know as I can blame you. But. t calculate I ’ve made it even now. I ’ve seen my little chap, boys; I’ve been out with him and his mother for more ’n a week. She come all the way to see me, and lugged the boy. It’s hard to believe it, boys, but it’s true, and I seen them a good ways towards home, and I bid them good-by and came back.” Here he stopped a minute and made Trap’s cap do service as a handkerchief, though the weather was not warm and the cap none too clean. “I thought I should never get here, boys ; y’ see, there ’s plenty ’ll lend a hand goin’ away, but nobody won’t help you to come back. It’s been pretty hard on me, and I guess I shan’t have much further to travel. But I come back, and here I am; and I guess that’s about all.”

He looked round at their dusky forms and faces, sitting before them in the dark corner, and then he added, —

“ And now, mates, as you and me has been sort of ’stranged, and I not saying not by rights, but yet taking it uncommon rough of you; and how that God A’mighty’s give me another try, and I come back free and unbeholen and says to you such as I have; and being about played, as I was saying, and not going much further than this here bunk of me and Browny’s, and wanting to come round to you all and shake hands on it; if there ’s any present as would like to come up and say bygones and call it square, why, here’s what’s left o’ mine, and thankful to be able.” And he hung his skeleton hand over his knees like a raveled and knotted bell-rope.

“ Boys,” said Dexter, facing round, “if there ’s any now present has anything to say agin the propersition made, he ain’t no mate o’ mine. How are you, Lark, old boy! Here’s both o’ mine, if they’ll do you any good; only don’t go to talking of pegging out. It’s agin the rules o’ the camp.”

One after another they followed Dexter’s lead, and came and shook hands with him, and each said his rough word of greeting and reconciliation. All but one. Dan Garman lay all the while in his bunk, a dark, low, thick-set fellow, whom nobody liked, and who had been found guilty of robbing his mates and had received rough justice at their hands. Larcom missed him and Kepler, with others; Kepler had been taken out dead the day before. Some of them tried to get Garman out, but he swore at them and said no, he’d see him in fire and brimstone first. So they bade Lark not mind him.

“ I’m glad that’s gone, boys,” Lark said. “ I ’m one of you now, and I thank you.”

Larcom talked to Dexter apart for a minute, and then Dexter got a handful of straw and began breaking off pieces two or three inches long, and the word was passed under the breath that they were to draw lots for the soldier’s cap and coat that had passed Larcom out and in again unsuspected. For one man of those sixty there was a pretty fair chance of liberty and home, and not one of them all but was profoundly moved and anxious. Not a man spoke while Dexter sat and counted and broke the straws, nor was his own hand too steady. Doubtless his thoughts were far away as he finished the number and gnawed off the last, and prayed that it might be his, making it full twice as long as the rest, so that there should be no mistake. He came then and put them into Larcom’s hand.

“ How many is there ? ’ ’ Larcom asked.

“ Sixty-three, without Dan. I don’t count him.”

“ Give me one more, Billy,” Larcom said; “ I don’t bear no grudge.”

Dexter muttered something like cursing, but he brought another straw.

“It’s your deal, Lark,” he said. “ But he has n’t got no right.”

“ Did you count me, Billy? ”

“ Yes, Lark; sixty-four’s all told.”

“ Then here’s mine,” Larcom said, taking out a short straw. “ Come on, now, boys.”

Orderly and silently they filed round, and sixty-two nervous hands drew an unspeakably bitter pang out of Larcom’s hand. Dexter was the last. Larcom looked up in his face as he reached and drew. There were only two straws, and he drew a short one. Larcom opened his hand and the long straw lay across his bony fingers. Dexter stood and stared at his own hand and at Larcom’s. It was so near, no wonder it shook him.

“I wanted you to have it, Billy,” Lareom said; " I’m devilish sorry.”

Dexter never answered a word, but turned straight about and went and hid himself in his dark corner. Larcom turned his eyes toward Garman’s bunk; the fellow was leaning out of it, with eager, fox eyes staring through the dusk. Larcom reached the straw at him, and he came sliding out and took it, gathered up the cap and coat, and went back with them into his bunk without a word. Then Larcom laid himself down in the bunk as wearily as ever man went to his rest, and those who were next him thought it was true, as he said, that he would not go much further on this side the impenetrable wall.

The night was pretty sharp, and some of the well ones shivered in the dismal place; Larcom was too tired to sleep and suffered severely with cold. It seemed to him near morning, but was not yet very late, when some one came and laid a blanket over him cautiously, and was creeping away again, but stopped and crouched down close by on the floor. Larcom was going to speak, but his voice failed, through faintness and cold.

“ Lark,” said a low, coarse, cautious voice. He knew it was Garman’s, but had never heard it quite like that. “ Lark,” the voice repeated, “ are you cold now? ”

“ No, Dan, not now,” Lareom answered. And a long shiver, half-sob, like a child’s, ran through the words. The fellow went and brought all his outer clothing, and spread it over him, and Trap’s coat on top of that, and tucked them round him. Then he crouched down awhile again by the bed in the darkness.

“ Lark,” he said finally, in the same hoarse, low voice.

And the querulous voice answered weakly, “ Well, Dan? ”

“ You said you did n’t bear no grudge? ”

“ No, Dan.” Then there was silence a while, and they heard Dexter across the room talking in his sleep: —

“You might ’a’ waited, Susie. You knew I’d ’a’ come if I could.”

Then he whimpered a little and muttered incoherently. Snoring Chauncey woke himself with a fiercer snort, turned over, and then all was still again. Garman’s low voice spoke again presently, with something like awe in it now: —

“ Arc you goin’ to croak, Lark? ”

“ I guess so, Dan,” shivering and a little fretfully. “ It ’s rough, Dan. Dan,” after a minute, “ do you know anything you could say? ”

Dan knew nothing appropriate to such occasions except “ When little Samuel woke, and heard his breakfast cookin’!” He asked Lark if he thought it would do any good to say that.

“No, I'm afraid not,” Larcom answered. “ Never mind, Dan! ”

“Well, I’m sorry, Lark. I ain’t no good, and I don’t know nothin’. And I ain’t got nobody to learn me. Lark,” he added after a pause, “ what I was goin’ to say to you, don’t you go to have your woman and her young one a-layin’ on your mind. If you give me leaf and tell me where, I been blacksmithin’ twenty year now, and a money-makin’ business, and ain’t afraid of no man, give me hammer and rasp, — and what I say to you, Lark, is I ’ll see to ’em, such as it is.”

Larcom lifted himself on his arm and tried to look over the side into the shadowed, crouching fellow’s face.

“ There’s matches in Trap’s coat. Get them,” he said.

Garman groped about the bunk and got them.

“ Light it,” Larcom said. “ Get up.”

Garman rose on his knees, scratched a match, and held up the flickering flame. By its light Larcom saw the cowering, half-naked figure of the man, and stared hard into his ugly face. Half-revealed faces rose and looked at them out of the gloom.

“ Dan Garman,” he said, his white lips trembling, “lookin’ in a dyin’ man’s face and sayin' as you have, do you mean true and on the square ? ’

And Garman prayed for fearful and eternal retribution on his soul if he did not.

“ So help you, Dan? ”

“ So help me God! ”

The match was out, and Larcom fell back in the bunk. “ Thank y', Dan. I believe you,” he said out of the black corner. “ I don’t mind so much now.”

He told him the place where they lived. Garman felt for his hand and his fingers recoiled when they found it, it was so fleshless, clammy, and cold. He fumbled with it awkwardly a minute, and then stowed it away under the clothes.

“ Don’t mind me, go to bed now,” Larcom said. “ Good night, Dan.”

“ Good night, Lark. I ’ll be right here if you want me. I ’ll lay by you till mornin’.” He cuddled himself down in a ball on the floor, for cold; and after a while he forgot cold and all and lay gently snoring. When he rose in the dawn and dressed himself, stiff and sore, Larcom was fast asleep, and he did not wake him, but watched his chance, put on the enemy’s coat and cap, and marched out boldly and got safely away.

It was pretty late when Dexter came over and looked into Lareom’s face, turned partly away; and he said to Chauncey near by, —

“ He’s sleeping sweet and smiling to himself. You bet he’s dreaming of the little chap.”

He would not have waked him for the world, but he could not help leaning over and laying his finger on his cheek. He stood up then and turned to those near him with an altered face.

“ Lark’s got the start of us, boys,” he said. “ Lark ’s gone home! ”

James T. McKay.