“I will certainly do my best; and to insure it I will go to the railroad operator, who understands the stations, and can catch Dunbar more easily than a message from the general office.  Write our your telegram, while I order my buggy.”

“Mr. Dunbar.  On board Train No. 2.

“Please let me see you before you go West.  I promise information that will render you unwilling to make the journey to Bismarck.”

“B.”

Anxiously she computed the time within which an answer might reasonably be expected; and her heart dwelt as a suppliant before God, that the message would avail to arrest pursuit; but hours wore wearily away, tedious days trod upon the slow skirts of dreary nights; and no response lifted the burden of dread.  Hope whispered feebly that his failure to send a telegraphic reply, implied his intention of returning to X—–­from Philadelphia; and she clung to this rope of sand until a week had passed.  Then the conviction was inevitable that he regarded her appeal as merely a ruse to divert his course, to delay the seizure of his prey; and that while he misinterpreted the motive that prompted her message, she had merely furnished an additional goad to his jealous hatred.

As helpless wrack borne on the sullen tide of destiny, she struck her trembling hands together, and cried out in the dark solitude of her cell:  “Verily!  The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.”

CHAPTER XXV.

The winter was marked by an unusual severity of cold, which prolonged the rigor of mid-season until late in February, and despite the efforts of penitentiary officials who made unprecedented requisitions upon the board of inspectors, for additional clothing, the pent human herd suffered keenly.

Alarmed by the rapidly increasing rate of sickness within the “walls,” Mr. Singleton demanded a sanitary commission, which, after apparently thorough investigation, reported no visible local cause for the mortality among the convicts; but the germs of disease grew swiftly as other evil weeds, and the first week in March saw a hideous harvest of diphtheria of the most malignant type.

At the earliest intimation of the character of the pestilence, the warden’s wife fled with her little children to her mother’s home in a neighboring county; maternal solicitude having extinguished her womanly reluctance to desert her husband, at a juncture when her presence and assistance would so materially have cheered, and lightened his labors.  An attempt was made to isolate the first case in the hospital, but the cots in that spacious apartment filled beyond the limits of accommodation; and soon, a large proportion of the cells on the ground floor held each its victim of the fatal disease, that as the scythe of death cut a wide swath through convict ranks.  Consulting physicians walked through the infected ward, altered prescriptions, advised disinfectants which were liberally