The Bondman: A New Saga

CHAPTER II.

The Sulphur Mines

Red Jason and Michael Sunlocks were together at last, within the narrow stockade of a penal settlement. These two, who had followed each other from land to land, the one on his errand of vengeance, the other on his mission of mercy, both now nourishing hatred and lust of blood, were thrown as prisoners into the Sulphur Mines of Krisuvik. There they met, they spoke, they lived and worked side by side yet neither knew the other for the man he had sought so long and never found. This is the strange and wondrous chance that has now to be recorded, and only to think of it, whether as accident or God's ordinance, makes the blood to tingle in every vein. Poor and petty are the passions of man, and God's hand is over all.

The only work of Michael Sunlocks which Jorgen Jorgensen did not undo in the swift reprisals which followed on the restoration of his power was the use of the Sulphur Mines as a convict settlement. All he did was to substitute Danish for Icelandic guards, but this change was the beginning and end of the great event that followed. The Icelandic guards knew Red Jason, and if Michael Sunlocks had been sent out to them they would have known him also, and thus the two men must have soon known each other. But the Danish warders knew nothing of Jason, and when they brought out Michael Sunlocks they sent the Icelandic guards home. Thus Jason never heard that Michael Sunlocks was at the Sulphur Mines, and though in the whirl of many vague impressions, the distant hum of a world far off, there floated into his mind the news of the fall of the Republic he could never suspect, and there was no one to tell him, that the man whom he had pursued and never yet seen, the man he hated and sought to slay, was a convict like himself, working daily and hourly within sight and sound of him.

Michael Sunlocks, on his part, knew well that Red Jason had been sent to the Sulphur Mines; but he also knew that he had signed Jason's pardon and ordered his release. More than this, he had learned that Jorgen Jorgensen had liberated all who had been condemned by the Republic, and so he concluded that Jason had become a free man when he himself became a prisoner. But there had been a delay in the despatch of Jason's pardon, and when the Republic had fallen and the Danish officers had taken the place of the Icelanders, the captain of the mines had released the political prisoners only, and Jason, as a felon, had been retained. The other prisoners at the mines, some fifty in all, knew neither Michael Sunlocks nor Red Jason. They were old criminals from remote districts, sentenced to the jail at Reykjavik, during the first rule of Jorgen Jorgensen, and sent out to Krisuvik in the early days of the Republic.

Thus it chanced from the first that though together within a narrow space of ground Jason and Sunlocks were cut off from all knowledge of each other such as might have been gleaned from those about them. And the discipline of the settlement kept them back from that knowledge by keeping them for many months apart.

The two houses used as workshops and sleeping places were at opposite sides of the stockade, one at the north, the other at the south; one overlooking a broad waste of sea, the other at the margin of a dark lake of gloomy shore. Red Jason was assigned to the house near the sea, Michael Sunlocks to the house by the lake. These houses were built of squared logs with earthen floors, and wooden benches for beds. The prisoners entered them at eight o'clock in the evening, and left them at five in the morning, their hours of labor in summer being from five a. m. to eight p. m. They brought two tin cans, one tin containing their food, their second meal of the day, a pound of stock fish, and four ounces of bread; the other tin intended for their refuse of slops and victuals and dirt of other kinds. Each house contained some twenty-five men and boys, and so peopled and used they had quickly become grimy and pestilential, the walls blotched with vermin stains, the floors encrusted with hard trodden filth that was wet and slippery to the feet, and the atmosphere damp and foul to the nostrils from the sickening odors of decayed food.

It had been a regulation from the beginning that the latest comer at each of these houses should serve three months as housekeeper, with the duty of cleansing the horrible place every morning after his housemates had left it for their work. During this time he wore the collar of iron and the bell over his forehead, for it was his period of probation and of special degradation. Thus Red Jason served as housekeeper in the house by the sea, while Michael Sunlocks did the same duty in the house by the lake. Jason went through his work listlessly, slowly, hopelessly, but without a murmur. Michael Sunlocks rebelled against its horrible necessities, for every morning his gorge rose at the exhalations of five-and-twenty unwashed human bodies, and the insupportable odor that came of their filthy habits.

This state of things went on for some two months, during which the two men had never met, and then an accident led to a change in the condition of both.

The sulphur dug up from the banks of the hot springs was packed in sacks and strapped upon ponies, one sack at each side of a pony and one on its back, to be taken to Hafnafiord, the nearest port for shipment to Denmark. Now the sulphur was heavy, the sacks were large, the ponies small, and the road down from the solfataras to the valley was rough with soft clay and great basaltic boulders. And one day as a line of the ponies so burdened came down the breast of the mountain, driven on by a carrier who lashed them at every step with his long whip of leather thongs, one little piebald mare, hardly bigger than a donkey, stumbled into a deep rut and fell. At that the inhuman fellow behind it flogged it again, and showered curses on it at every blow.

"Get up, get up, or I'll skin you alive," he cried, with many a hideous oath beside.

And at every fresh blow the little piebald struggled to rise but she could not, while its terrified eyeballs stood out from the sockets and its wide nostrils quivered.

"Get up, you little lazy devil, get up," cried the brute with the whip, and still his blows fell like raindrops, first on the mare's flanks, then on its upturned belly, then on its head, its mouth, and last of all on its eyes.

But the poor creature's load held it down, and, struggle as it would, it could not rise. The gang of prisoners on the hillside who had just before burdened the ponies and sent them off, heard this lashing and swearing, and stopped their work to look down. But they thought more of the carrier than of the fallen pony, and laughed aloud at his vain efforts to bring it to its feet.

"Send him a hand up, Jonas," shouted one of the fellows.

"Pick him up in your arms, old boy," shouted another, and at every silly sally they all roared together.

The jeering incensed the carrier, and he brought down his whip the fiercer and quicker at every fresh blow, until the whizzing of the lash sang in the air, and the hills echoed with the thuds on the pony's body. Then the little creature made one final, frantic effort, and plunging with its utmost strength it had half risen to its forelegs when one of the sacks slid from its place and got under its hind legs, whereupon the canvas gave way, the sulphur fell out, and the poor little brute slipped afresh and fell again, flat, full length, and with awful force and weight, dashing its head against a stone. At sight of this misadventure the prisoners above laughed once more, and the carrier leaped from his own saddle and kicked the fallen piebald in the mouth.

Now this had occurred within the space of a stone's-throw from the house which Red Jason lived in and cleaned, and hearing the commotion as he worked within he had come out to learn the cause of it. Seeing everything in one quick glance, he pushed along as fast as he could for the leg-fetters that bound him, and came upon the carrier as he was stamping the life out of the pony with kicks on its palpitating sides. At the next moment he had laid the fellow on his back, and then, stepping up to the piebald, he put his arms about it to lift it to its feet. Meantime the prisoners above had stopped their laughing, and were looking on with eyes of wonder at Jason's mighty strength.

"God! Is it possible he is trying to lift a horse to its feet?" cried one.

"What? and three sacks of sulphur as well?" cried another.

"Never," cried a third; and all held their breath.

Jason did not stop to remove the sacks. He wound his great arms first under the little beast's neck, and raised it to its forefeet, and then squaring his broad flanks above his legs that held the ground like the hoofs of an ox, he made one silent, slow, tremendous upward movement, and in an instant the piebald was on its feet, affrighted, trembling, with startled eyeballs and panting nostrils, but secure and safe, and with its load squared and righted on her back.

"Lord bless us!" cried the convicts, "the man has the strength of Samson."

And at that moment one of the warders came hurrying up to the place.

"What's this?" said the warder, looking at the carrier on the ground, who was groaning in some little blood that was flowing from the back of his head.

At that question the carrier only moaned the louder, thinking to excite the more commiseration, and Jason said not a word. But the prisoners on the hillside very eagerly shouted an explanation; whereupon the carrier, a prisoner who had been indulged, straightway lost his privileges as punishment for his ill use of the property of the Government; and Jason, as a man whose great muscles were thrown away on the paltry work of prison-cleaning, was set to delving sulphur on the banks of the hot springs.

Now this change for the better in the condition of Red Jason led to a change for the worse in that of Michael Sunlocks, for when Jason was relieved of his housekeeping and of the iron collar and bell that had been the badge of it, Sunlocks, as a malcontent, was ordered to clean Jason's house as well as his own. But so bad a change led to the great event in the lives of both, the meeting of these men face to face, and the way of it was this:

One day, the winter being then fully come, the mornings dark, and some new fallen snow lying deep over the warm ground of the stockade, Michael Sunlocks had been set to clearing away from the front of the log house on the south before Jason and his housemates had come out of it. His bodily strength had failed him greatly by this time, his face was pale, his large eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and under the heavy labor of that day his tall, slight figure stooped. But a warder stood over him leaning on a musket and urging him on with words that were harder to him than his hard work. His bell rang as he stooped, and rang again as he rose, and at every thrust of the spade it rang, so that when Jason and his gang came out of the sickening house, he heard it. And hearing the bell, he remembered that he himself had worn it, and, wondering who had succeeded him in the vile office whereof he had been relieved, he turned to look upon the man who was clearing the snow.

There are moments when the sense of our destiny is strong upon us, and this was such a moment to Red Jason. He saw Michael Sunlocks for the first time, but without knowing him, and yet at that sight every pulse beat and every nerve quivered. A great sorrow and a great pity took hold of him. The face he looked upon moved him, the voice he heard thrilled him, and by an impulse that he could not resist he stopped and turned to the warder leaning on the musket and said:

"Let me do this man's work. It would be nothing to me. He is ill. Send him up to the hospital."

"March!" shouted his own warders, and they hustled him along, and at the next minute he was gone. Then the bell stopped for an instant, for Michael Sunlocks had raised his head to look upon the man who had spoken. He did not see Jason's face, but his own face softened at the words he had heard and his bloodshot eyes grew dim.

"Go on!" cried the warder with the musket, and the bell began again.

All that day the face of Michael Sunlocks haunted the memory of Red Jason.

"Who was that man?" he asked of the prisoner who worked by his side.

"How should I know?" the other fellow answered sulkily.

In a space of rest Jason leaned on his shovel, wiped his brow, and said to his warder, "What was that man's name?"

"A 25," the warder answered moodily.

"I asked for his name," said Jason.

"What's that to you?" replied the warder.

A week went by, and the face of Sunlocks still haunted Jason's memory. It was with him early and late, the last thing that stood up before his inward eye when he lay down to sleep, the first thing that came to him when he awoke; sometimes it moved him to strange laughter when the sun was shining, and sometimes it touched him to tears when he thought of it in the night. Why was this? He did not know, he could not think, he did not try to find out. But there it was, a living face burnt into his memory – a face so strangely new to him, yet so strangely familiar, so unlike to anything he had ever yet seen, and yet so like to everything that was near and dear to himself, that he could have fancied there had never been a time when he had not had it by his side. When he put the matter to himself so he laughed and thought "How foolish." But no self-mockery banished the mystery of the power upon him of the man's face that he saw for a moment one morning in the snow.

He threw off his former listlessness and began to look keenly about him. But one week, two weeks, three weeks passed, and he could nowhere see the same face again. He asked questions but learned nothing. His fellow-prisoners began to jeer at him. Upon their souls, the big red fellow had tumbled into love with the young chap with the long flaxen hair, and maybe he thought it was a woman in disguise.

Jason knocked their chattering heads together and so stopped their ribald banter, but his warders began to watch him with suspicion, and he fell back on silence.

A month passed, and then the chain that was slowly drawing the two men together suddenly tightened. One morning the order came down from the office of the Captain that the prisoners' straw beds were to be taken out into the stockyard and burnt. The beds were not old, but dirty and damp and full of foul odors. The officers of the settlement said this was due to the filthy habits of the prisoners. The prisoners on their part said it came of the pestilential hovels they were compelled to live in, where the ground was a bog, the walls and roof were a rotten coffin, and the air was heavy and lifeless. Since the change of warders, there had been a gradual decline in the humanity with which they had been treated, and to burn up their old beds without giving them new ones was to deprive them of the last comfort that separated the condition of human beings from that of beasts of the field.

But the Captain of the Mines was in no humor to bandy parts with his prisoners, and in ordering that the beds should be burnt to prevent an outbreak of disease, he appointed that the prisoner B 25, should be told off to do the work. Now B 25 was the prison name of Red Jason, and he was selected by reason of his great bodily strength, not so much because the beds required it, as from fear of the rebellion of the poor souls who were to lose them.

So at the point of a musket Red Jason was driven on to his bad work, and sullenly he went through it, muttering deep oaths from between his grinding teeth, until he came to the log hut where Michael Sunlocks slept, and there he saw again the face that had haunted his memory.

"This bed is dry and sound," said Michael Sunlocks, "and you shall not take it."

"Away with it," shouted the warder to Jason, who had seemed to hesitate.

"It is good and wholesome, let him keep it," said Jason.

"Go on with your work," cried the warder, and the lock of his musket clicked.

"Civilized men give straw to their dogs to lie on," said Michael Sunlocks.

"It depends what dogs they are," sneered the warder.

"If you take our beds, this place will be worse than an empty kennel," said Michael Sunlocks.

"Better that than the mange," said the warder. "Get along, I tell you," he cried again, handling his musket and turning to Jason.

Then, with a glance of loathing, Jason picked up the bed in his fingers, that itched to pick up the warder by the throat, and swept out of the place.

"Slave!" cried Michael Sunlocks after him. "Pitiful, miserable, little-hearted slave!"

Jason heard the hot words that pursued him, and his face grew as red as his hair, and his head dropped into his breast. He finished his task in less than half an hour more, working like a demented man at piling up the dirty mattresses, into a vast heap, and setting light to the damp straw. And while the huge bonfire burned, and he poked long poles into it to give it air to blaze by, he made excuse of the great heat to strip of the long rough overcoat that had been given him to wear through the hard months of the winter. By this time the warder had fallen back from the scorching flames, and Jason, watching his chance, stole away under cover of deep whorls of smoke, and got back into the log cabin unobserved.

He found the place empty; the man known to him as A 25 was not anywhere to be seen. But finding his sleeping bunk – a bare slab resembling a butcher's board – he stretched his coat over it where the bed had been, and then fled away like a guilty thing.

When the great fire had burned low the warder returned, and said, "Quick there; put on your coat and let's be off."

At that Jason pretended to look about him in dismay.

"It's gone," he said, in a tone of astonishment.

"Gone? What? Have you burnt it up with the beds?" cried the warder.

"Maybe so," said Jason, meekly.

"Fool," cried the warder; "but it's your loss. Now you'll have to go in your sheepskin jacket, snow or shine."

With a cold smile about the corners of his mouth, Jason bent his head and went on ahead of his warder.

If the Captain of the Mines had been left to himself he might have been a just and even a merciful man, but he was badgered by inhuman orders from Jorgen Jorgensen at Reykjavik, and one by one the common privileges of his prisoners were withdrawn. As a result of his treatment, the prisoners besieged him with petitions as often as he crossed their path. The loudest to complain and the most rebellious against petty tyranny was Michael Sunlocks; the humblest, the meekest, the most silent under cruel persecution was Red Jason. The one seemed aflame with indignation; the other appeared destitute of all manly spirit.