the dripping cap off his forehead, and looked around.  No light nor life on any side:  even in the heavens yawned that breathless, uncolored silence that precedes a winter’s dawn.  He could see the Ohio through the gully:  why, it used to be a broad, full-breasted river, glancing all over with light, loaded with steamers and rafts going down to the Mississippi.  He had gone down once, rafting, with lumber, and a jolly three weeks’ float they had of it.  Now it was a solid, shapeless mass of blocks of ice and mud.  Winter? yes, but the world was altered somehow, the very river seemed struck with death.  His teeth chattered; he began to try to rub some warmth into his rheumatic legs and arms; tried to bring back the fancy of last night about Martha and the fire.  But that was a long way off:  there were all these years’ mastering memories to fade it out, you know, and besides, a diseased habit of desponding.  The world was wide to him, cowering out from a cell:  where were Martha and the little chaps lost in it?  John said they were dead.  Where should he turn now?  There was an aguish pain in his spine that blinded him:  since yesterday he had eaten nothing,—­he had no money to buy a meal; he was a felon,—­who would give him work?  “There’s some things certain in the world,” he muttered.

“That was silly last night,—­silly.  And yet,—­if there could have been a chance!”

He looked up steadily into the sickly, discolored sky:  nothing there but the fog from these swamps.  He had not wished so much that he could hear of Martha and the children, when he looked up, as of something else that he needed more.  Even the foulest and most careless soul that God ever made has some moments when it grows homesick, conscious of the awful vacuum below its life, the Eternal Arm not being there.  Yarrow was neither foul nor careless.  All his life, most in those years in the prison, he had been hungry for Something to rest on, to own him.  Sometimes, when his evil behavior had seemed vilest to him, he had felt himself trembling on the verge of a great forgiveness.  But he could see so little of the sky in the cell there,—­only that three-cornered patch:  he had a fancy, that, if once he were out in the world that He made,—­in the free air,—­that, if there were a God, he would find Him out.  He had not found Him.

He sat on the stump awhile, his hands over his eyes, then got down slowly, buttoning his soggy waistcoat and coat.

“I don’t see as there’s a chance,” he said, dully.  “I was a fool to think there was any better God than the one that”—­digging his toe into the frozen pools.  “It’s all ruled.  I’m not one of the elect.”

That was all.  After that, he stood waiting for his brother.

“I’ll help him.  He’s the best I know.”

Even the faint sigh choked before it rose to his lips,—­both manhood and hope were so dead with inanition; yet a life’s failure went in it.

While he stood waiting, Martha Yarrow sat by her kitchen-fire crying to God to help him; but He knew what things were needed before she asked Him.