and sympathy.  But Jack scarcely grasped his meaning, and his answer sounded chillingly calm; so that the boy, wincing under the cold stare of the Captain and the seeming indifference of the prisoner, turned away with downy chin a-tremble and in his eyes the look of horrified awe which sometimes comes to a youth who has seen death hesitate just over his head, pass him by, and choose another.  In the doorway he stopped and looked back bewildered.  Jack had said that he loved life and would hate to leave it; and yet he sat there calmly, scraping idly with his boot-toe a little furrow in the loose sand, his elbows resting on his knees, his face unlined by frown or bitterness, his eyes bent abstractedly upon the shallow trench he was desultorily digging.  He did not look as the boy believed a man should look who has just been condemned to die the ignominious death of hanging.  The boy shuddered and went out into the sunlight, dazed with this glimpse he had got of the inexorable hardness of life.

Jack did not even know when the boy left.  He, also, was looking upon the hardness of life, but he was looking with the eyes of the fighter.  So long as Jack Allen had breath in his body, he would fight to keep it there.  His incredulity against the verdict swung to a tenacious disbelief that it would really come to the worst.  So long as he was alive, so long as he could feel the weight of the dagger in his sleeve, it was temperamentally impossible for him to believe that he was going to die that day.

Plans he made and smoothed them in the dirt with his toe.  If they did not bind his arms...  They had not tied Sandy’s arms, he remembered; and he wondered if a dagger concealed in Sandy’s sleeve would have made any essential difference in the result of that particular crime of the Committee.  He sickened at a vivid memory of how Sandy had ridden away, just a week or so before; and of the appealing glance which he had sent toward Bill’s place when Shorty started to lead the buckskin from before the prison tent with six men walking upon either side and a curious crowd straggling after.  Would a dagger in Sandy’s sleeve have made any difference?

Then his thoughts swung to the Mexican who had told him of the trick, only the night before.  It had amused Jack to experiment with his own knife; and the very novelty of the thing had impelled him to slip his dagger into the new hiding-place that morning when he dressed.  The Captain had not discovered it there—­but would it make any difference?  It occurred to him that he need not die the death of dangling and strangling at the end of the rope, at any rate; if it came to dying...  Jack became acutely conscious of the steady beat in his chest, and immediately afterward felt the same throb in his throat; he could stop that beating whenever he chose, if they did not bind his arms.

“Horse’s ready, Captain,” announced Shorty succinctly, thrusting his head through the closed flaps; and the Captain rose instantly and made a commanding gesture to his prisoner.