WHAT HAPPENED AT THE OAK Jack sat looking after the crowd that shuffled through the doorway into the sunlight.

He thought he had believed that he would receive the sentence which the juryman had spoken so baldly; yet, after the words had been actually spoken, he stared blankly after Bill and the others, and incredulously at the Captain, who seated himself upon a bunk opposite to watch his prisoner, his pistol resting suggestively upon his knee.

The boy lingered to shake Jack's unresponsive hand and mutter a broken sentence or two of gratitude 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.