they fluttered over Polite Pete; Red Pete; Pete the Bloody.

Before the half-helplessness of the husband took voice in answer to her questioning eyes, Polite Pete-he of the Dripping Dirk-he, the abominator of ministerial mankind-he, the director of the mental attitudes of all wise citizens of The Dip-stepped forward and accosted the pale parson.

"Air you lookin' for friends?" said Pete, looking down at him and speaking very distinctly, for Pete.

The pale parson looked up at Pete. There didn't seem to be much choice in the crowd gathered about. Perhaps a sense of grim amusement touched the pale parson, for he, too, smiled-at Pete, but it was a smile that somehow seemed to invite Pete to comradeship. It seemed to take Pete indoors with him into a grim, shadowy shack of a situation, where there were only cow-skulls to sit upon instead of chairs; and the thigh-bones of oxen instead of couches; and wads of human hair instead of cushions; and seemed to say to him-"Brother!"

Again we saw the effect of a smile. What the parson said along with the smile was, "I hope to find friends by and by, but I want a place to lodge my family." He said it freely and friendlily, as though he and Pete were long-time friends. It was a voice that belonged with the smile. The young wife had drawn near and her patient eyes rested inquiringly upon Pete's face.

"Joe," quoth Pete, turning to a redeyed duffer who sat astride a wheelbarrow -and Pete's voice rang out big and fierce, and his lisp was scarcely discernible, "Them skins scattered about in your dig gins would just about fit that new shanty of Cole's, likewise that bear-hide and the rockin' chair uv mine. See t' havin' the transfer made, while I escort this couple t' your shack, Cole," said he to a onearmed man on a near-by keg.

As I said before, Pete's point of view was permeating in its quality, and before we were really awake to the situation, the pale couple and their little baby were housekeeping in Cole's shack and the baby was being rocked to sleep in a box cradle that Pete's own kid had used.

Pete's manner toward these proceedings was screaming with wit, if brevity

is the essence of that quality. It began and ended with orders tersely issued. There were no words used that were not essential to the sense. There weren't any explanations. Perhaps he felt that The Dip was not educated up to the point of digesting his reasons. Perhaps he couldn't tell himself why he did it.

But the young parson hoped too much. This was natural, considering Pete's kindness in letting him live, which, not being educated in the history of The Dip, he could not appreciate as fully as the rest of us; and he hoped to get Pete's support in the work the Home Mission Board sent him there to do. But in this he was destined to receive a hard blow. It was all the harder and even humiliating in the manner and place Pete dealt it. It was in the Five Point saloon, the biggest and most crowded always, that the young parson made his first move. Pete came over and put a hand on the nape of his neck. There was a wicked gleam in Pete's one wicked eye.

"Look-a-here, ef it's your job to decorate The Dip with your yaller face and white shirt and draw down a livin' from your Board of Doodiddlin' Busybodies,well an' good. I guess this mountain air will do your wife an' kid good. We won't hurt ye, s'long ez ye don't get in th' way; nor eject ye from Th' Dip. Ye ain't a drinkin' man, we all take it. Well, don't come inter drinkin' places. You stay to home an' rock the cradle. T-h-e-e?"

This was Pete's attitude, and to it speedily adjusted itself The Dip. They tolerated the pale young man and his pale, patient wife, with her eloquent, patiencemother-speaking eyes. They would not hurt him so long as he stayed out of the way.

For a number of weeks things went on like that; as many as five. The parson sensibly acquiesced in the suggestion not to attempt to preach or pray in the saloons. It is neither dignified nor useful to remain in a crowd of ruffians who treat you like a troublesome kid; would not hesitate even to turn you across a knee and paddle you with a slat.

Ellery Craigh pondered and prayed at home. He put up a notice on his door and at the window and on the gate and anywhere he thought the desecration would be permitted, that he would preach

at such an hour by day and by evening at his house. Nobody ever came.

I suppose in time he would have drifted out of The Dip at the end of the long rope of toleration, but fate again stepped in and became personified in Polite Pete, Pete of the Bloody Shirt.

Pete's kid took down with a sickness. It was a kind of fever. On the second day of the fever the parson's wife came to Pete's shanty. She came to ask permission to do something for the child, but when she stood in the doorway and looked into the room with its tumble and tousle and mess, its profusion and confusion, and the hot little body on Pete's knee, all her timidity and hesitation went in one brief, gasping "Oh!"

She bathed and wrapped the child's body in a clean sheet, which she sent to Cole's shack for. She had half the stuff in Pete's shack taken out, and a wide space cleared around the cot. For two weeks she lived from one shack to the other. Every morning she came and tended the witless child, and told Pete what to do in her absence. Every evening she came again. Her soft, quiet, cool presence radiated healing. Her eyes looked down on his hot, moaning little body with an infinite tenderness. lips breathed prayers for his comfort.

Her

He mended in time, and grew well. Pete had faced many a situation, grim as the death which followed ofttimes; he had faced knife and bullet, and all manner of evil, wretchedness, woe and sin. He was at home with them all. He knew how to deal with the issue. But except for the embryonic flash of gratitude he knew not what it was on the day the tender mother looked down upon the imbecile child, he had never known a sentiment that was not brutal and harsh save his own racking and torturing love for his child.

It was to Pete as though he were shackled with an invisible net that twined about his feet and made walking difficult. It was a worry on him, like a halter dragging. He was the victim of a great, unbounded gratitude, a way to manifest which he could not find. It was a sacred thing that could not be paid for in gold. A tender, loving woman had given him back the life of the only thing the world held for him, and he could only sit in his

brute ugliness and watch her slender body swaying as with light steps she went away, leaving the weak human remnant clean, comfortable and as happy as the little animal it so pitifully resembled.

These things Pete felt, but he knew not how to express them to himself, even in thought. But after a little time, expression always took the form of activity with Pete. This time it was a sweeping activity that would have been resistless, even had not the influence of the patient woman set its mark on all in The Dip that knew of her deed.

It was an activity that embraced and symbolized Pete's philosophy of reward. This comprehended a single idea: tangible result. Tangible result meant success in whatever form and manner you might happen to want it, whether to win at a fling of dice or successfully stab a brother. It was the biggest gain. Ellery Craigh's biggest gain would be represented by the biggest number of attendants at his preachings, and the biggest number of sinners repentant. If, therefore, Ellery Craigh should convert the biggest number of sinners in Copper Dip, then it would be a feather in his cap, and the Doodiddle Busybodies who sent him there would be filled with astonishment and respect for him and he would be called to occupy better paying posts. The pale, fagged face of his patient wife would brighten under more fashionable bonnets than the brown worsted thing she wore.

These thoughts in more or less orderly sequence addressed themselves to Pete in the waking nights of the child's convalescence, when he watched and rocked and administered the medicines the woman left. They grew clearer and more consecutive to him as his oppression of fear gradually receded with the child's gaining health. It became a fixed formula by the end of a couple of weeks. A fixed formula with Pete meant action in its most stringent guise. That night forty sinners -none with less than a six-shooter on him-professed a disturbed and repentant state of soul and a desire for baptismal rites or whatever Parson Craigh saw fit. Pete led the procession, and sat up in front with his gun across his knees in much the same attitude that he had sat the day Ellery Craigh and his young wife and baby disembarked. He tempered his soft

ened mood judiciously and did not permit it to influence him when any showed a disposition to hang back. He rebuked

them earnestly and blasphemously, calling them names chosen with peculiar fitness to describe their disgraceful condition of soul and mind.

It was a strange occasion. The pale young parson was excited and earnest, trying to cope with he hardly knew what, but recognizing an opportunity to speak words that might, at least, be bread on the waters; the pale young wife, with all of the Blessed Presence shining around her head, stood up beside her husband, and helped him sing gospel songs-the refrain of which was familiar to Pete. He had heard them crooned over his feverish child and they made him sit up very straight and grip the cold barrel of his gun. He would just as soon have shot a fellow then and there who did not repent properly as to have drunk a glass of whiskey-than which, expression is inadequate.

Other hearers than Pete were touched by those melodies that conjured up longforgotten times and scenes and vanished folk and dead voices. Emotion became an enthusiasm; enthusiasm became a riot of emotion. Pete was obliged to threaten to shoot into a bunch of over-eager aspirants who were becoming disorderly in their efforts to take precedence in line of repent

ance.

The shining eyes of the patient-faced mother, and the excited happiness of the young preacher spread the contagion. Pete's satisfaction in his part was im

mense. He groaned and shouted with vehement enthusiasm; and swore and exhorted irrespective of what else was taking place. There was a special feature he particularly doted on. This was taking up the collection. After each repentant had his turn, Pete would sing out joyously, "Pass the hat!" If the collection was not generous enough to suit him, he promptly and fervently rebuked their meanness.

But Pete stood not alone in his enthusiasm. The same sinners came again and again to repent, till Pete was obliged to make a rule that one repentance per sinner would have to do for a single night.

At the end of two weeks of this extraordinary state of affairs, Ellery Craigh confessed himself nonplussed, as well as exhausted. Every night had been the occasion of a fine frenzy of repentance, accompanied by heavy collections; and every night, seemingly with refreshed and whetted appetites, the converts bade him a joyous adieu and repaired to the glories of a huge carousal at the saloons and dance halls.

But the fame of Ellery Craigh's work in the ungodly Dip went abroad and was known in the land and written up in the papers, that The Dip read with howls of approval. They drank to the health of the papers and the parson and repented again and again, passing the hat zealously.

It was even as Red Pete-he of the Dripping Dirk-forethought. In time the Doodiddles made a seat among the mighty for Ellery Craigh.

HE Island of Sakhalien; a chilling April dawn. The winter snow was everywhere, the winter ice lay hard on the Strait of Tartary; yet it was an early spring. The grim bulk of Alexandrovsk prison loomed blackly against the white world.

Marfa Zelenskya sat at a window of the women's prison and sewed by the dim daylight that crept in through the iron grates. In the center of the large, gloomy apartment, there was a long framework of wood, roughly but solidly put together; the top was like the roof of a cabin that has but little slope from ridgepole to eaves, and made of heavy unfinished boards, long since made smooth by the contact of human bodies. On each side of this, on the naked boards, stretched a row of women, the heads of the two rows meeting at the top. They were covered with thick gray blankets, and slept in their clothes. It was the prison bed. Marfa's place, alone, was vacant. A pale sunbeam slipped in through the grates and made a little spot of cold light at her feet.

There was a stir, then an upheaval, among the gray blankets, and the women slid down from their common couch. They yawned, stretched out arms, and dug knuckles into sleepy eyes. Some of them went so far toward making a toilet as to smooth the wrinkles out of the heavy felt garments they wore, and tighten around their legs the strips of cloth which served for stockings.

A large woman with a dark face made a joke in broken speech of Marfa's industry:

"She must be making her wedding dress, she so early at it."

The woman was a half-caste from Turkestan.

There was an unusual bustle among the women that morning, an air of expectancy was in the atmosphere, while they ate their black bread at the breakfast hour. Something was going to happen. It happened

once every year, but not to the same women, therefore it was always new to those to whom it happened.

Marfa, with head bowed over her work, sewed unmindfully, stitching, stitching her thoughts into the hopeless seam. She was thinking of another April day four years ago was it only four, or was it six, or ten-or was it a lifetime! She had walked alone on the Nevsky Prospect in her own splendid St. Petersburg-walked, because she chose to walk-because her blood was riotous with youth, and the joy of being alive. A nobleman's daughter, she should not have walked on the street unattended unless her carriage were at hand. And she had met Ivan Maximoff and shaken hands with him, which also she should not have done or at most should have given him but one finger to shake, as befitted the rank between them. As she thought it all over now for the many-hundredth time, it seemed to her that, somehow, she had always done the thing she should not have done, when it had concerned Ivan. Their very acquaintance had begun clandestinely, when she was eight and he was nine.

In her thoughts, sewing by the grated window of Alexandrovsk, she tried to justify herself for the unconventionality of that day on the Nevsky. Had he not pulled her out of the fishpond and saved her life the very first day of their acquaintance, when she was eight and he was nine? Yes; and she had slapped him and called him a savage for pulling her hair in his effort to pull her out of the pond. And he had smiled saucily and said: "Golubouschica!" Aye; even then he had called her "beloved" and "little dove" for a slap.

But it was to that other April day her mind traveled back this dreary morning. Again she walked to the summer garden on the Nevsky, and sat by his side watching the lights and shadows on the old palace of Peter the Great. Again he told her the story of his life since they had played together, through a broken wall, that beautiful stolen summer. Again he

confided to her his political dreams, and her heart grew large with interest and enthusiasm-the electric enthusiasm transmitted from a youth of nineteen to a maiden a year less his age. Living it all over again while sewing the hopeless seam in the prison of Alexandrovsk, her conscience pelted her for the foolishness of it all, it had brought her this! and so suddenly and so swiftly, she was dazed with the thinking of it.

Marfa Zelenskya was of the type of Russia's fairest women; her eyes were still brightly blue, her hair still the color of ripening corn, but the joy of being alive. had gone out of her face. There was a stoop at the nape of her once so shapely neck, her lips had forgotten to smile. But twenty-two! and she had lived a thousand years.

"Say, you young-one, over there!" the half-caste called to her from a group of women munching their black bread, "don't, you know what's to happen todav ?"

Marfa did not lift her eyes. Her own chunk of black bread lay beside her, unbroken. A tap on the window, directly at her head, aroused her attention. A man's face, with a knowing grin upon it, looked at her not unkindly, and a pair of rough hands were pushing through the grates a pound of white bread and a bottle of sweet milk. A scrap A scrap of paper dangled from a string on the neck of the bottle. "For Marfa Zelenskya," the man called out. Marfa held the white bread and the bottle of sweet milk hugged in her arms. In other lands a man sent flowers and sweets to a woman to show his favor, but were ever flowers so beautiful, or sweets so sweet!

"Oh! the beautiful white bread!" exclaimed a woman. "Oh! the white sweet milk!" exclaimed another. They gathered around her and looked.

"That is the third time it comes through the window," remarked the woman from Turkestan, "and she pertend not she know what it is will happen today."

Marfa was reading over and over again the one word scrawled on the scrap of paper-"Golubouschica." Who had written it? Her mother had called her that when she was a baby, and the darling boy Ivan had said it to her when he pulled her out of the fish pond. But all of that was ten

thousand miles away, and in a life that was dead to her forever. The women about her ate and chattered of that which was going to happen.

Another man approached the window, and pressed his face against the grating; it was a black, ugly, coarse face. A smile widened the heavy mouth at the way Marfa was holding the milk and white bread in her arms. The man was a Turk, one of the convict settlers. She had seen him at the window before; a shudder always took hold of her at sight of his evil face. He said some things to her rapidly, and in a language which she did not understand, then hearing the tramp of an approaching sentry, pointed a finger at the milk and bread, and dropped away from the window.

"Ah! She knows well enough what it is will happen today," laughed another woman in gray felt. It was a cracked, mirthless laugh.

"He is very black and ugly, and he will beat her; but it will be better than this." She swept a scornful glance around her.

"Yes, yes! Pretty bird! It will be better than this," called cheerily the Turkish woman. "He has a house of one big room of logs, he tell you, which he built himself, he has a well which he dig, he has a cow that give the beautiful sweet milk." She was from the same region of Turkestan, and understood what the black Turk had said.

"Ah! and he make it all right with the chief," she continued. "No other man will have the chance to choose you, pretty gold heart. Now I wonder who will take me? There are forty-two of us to be choose today. Some of the men will get fooled." She laughed gaily.

"And all of the women," said the woman whose laugh was mirthless. She was not one of the forty-two. The garrulous half-caste paid no heed to the interruption.

"He should take me, not you," she went on talking to Marfa. "He is a Turk like me. I know his language, I am his kind; he is here for the murder of his wife-I for the killing of a husband. He is a fool to take you.

Marfa's heart sickened; she dropped the scrap of paper with the word she had loved, and handed the pound of white