They were not all bad dreams:  in reality many of them stirred him and moved him happily, and he would waken to find the mighty tides of his blood surging fiercely through the avenues of veins.  Evidently they recalled some happiness that was forgotten.  And there was one phase, at least, of this work in the road gangs that brought him moving, intense delight.  It was merely the sight of the bird life, abounding in the fields and meadows about the towns.

There had been quite a northern migration lately, these late spring days.  The lesser songsters were already mating and nesting, and he found secret pleasure in their cheery calls and bustling activity.  But they didn’t begin to move him as did the waterfowl, passing in long V-shaped flocks.  That strange, wild wanderer’s greeting that the gray geese called down to their lesser brethren in the meadows had a really extraordinary effect upon him.  It always caught him up and held him, stirring some deep, strange part of him that he hardly knew existed.  Sometimes the weird, wailing sound brought him quite to the edge of a profound discovery, but always the flocks sped on and out of hearing before he could quite grasp it.  When the moon looked down, through the barred window of his cell, he sometimes felt the same way.  A great, white mysterious moon that he had known long ago.  It was queer that there should be a relationship between the gray geese and the cold, white satellite that rode in the sky.  Ben Kinney never tried to puzzle out what it was; but he always knew it with a knowledge not to be denied.

The last of the waterfowl had passed by now, but the northern migration was not yet done.  The sun still moved north; warm, north-blowing winds blew the last of the lowering, wintry clouds back to the Arctic Seas whence they had come.  And because the road work the convicts were doing brought them, this afternoon, in sight of the railroad right-of-way, Ben now and then caught sight of other wayfarers moving slowly, but no less steadily, toward the north.  The open road beckoned northward, these full, balmy, late-April days, and various tattered men, mostly vagabonds and tramps, passed the gang from time to time on this same, northern quest.

Ben thought about them as birds of passage, and the thought amused him.  And at the sight of a small, stooped figure advancing toward him up the railroad right-of-way he paused, leaning on his pick.

Because Ben had paused, for the first time in an hour, his two guards looked up to see what had attracted his attention.  They saw what seemed to them a white-haired old wanderer of sixty years or more; but at first they were wholly at a loss to explain Ben’s fascinated look of growing interest.