Page 365 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

have to be starved into submission. Meanwhile the usual
message ran through the island, and so admirable were
the arrangements which Arthur the reformer had initiated,
that, before noon of the next day, not a signal station on
the coast but knew that No. 8942, etc., etc., prisoner for life,
was illegally at large. This intelligence, further aided by a
paragraph in the Gazette anent the ‘Daring Escape’, noised
abroad, the world cared little that the Mary Jane, Govern-
ment schooner, had sailed for Port Arthur without Rufus
Dawes.
But two or three persons cared a good deal. Major Vick-
ers, for one, was indignant that his boasted security of bolts
and bars should have been so easily defied, and in propor-
tion to his indignation was the grief of Messieurs Jenkins,
Scott, and Co., suspended from office, and threatened with
absolute dismissal. Mr. Meekin was terribly frightened at
the fact that so dangerous a monster should be roaming
at large within reach of his own saintly person. Sylvia had
shown symptoms of nervous terror, none the less injurious
because carefully repressed; and Captain Maurice Frere
was a prey to the most cruel anxiety. He had ridden off at
a hand-gallop within ten minutes after he had reached the
Barracks, and had spent the few hours of remaining day-
light in scouring the country along the road to the North.
At dawn the next day he was away to the mountain, and
with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much of that
wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him.
He had offered to double the reward, and had examined a
number of suspicious persons. It was known that he had

For the Term of His Natural Life