“Well, old Nick,” said the young man at length, “this is to be our last evening together; and if ever I should touch land again, is there any way I could help you—is there anything I could do for you?”
“So then you're determined to try it?” said the other, in a low growling tone.
“That I am. I have not spent weeks filing through that confounded chain for nothing: one wrench now and it's smashed.”
“And then?” asked the old man with a grin.
“And then I'll have a swim for it. I know all that—I know it all,” said he, answering a gesture of the other's hand; “but do you think I care to drag out such a life as this?”
“I do,” was the quiet reply.
“Then why you do is clear and clean beyond me. To me it is worse than fifty deaths.”
“Look here, lad,” said the old man, with a degree of animation he had not shown before. “There are four hundred and eighty of us here: some for ten, some for twenty years, some for life; except yourself alone there is not one has the faintest chance of a pardon. You are English, and your nation takes trouble about its people, and, right or wrong, in the end gets them favorable treatment, and yet you are the only man here would put his life in jeopardy on so poor a chance.”
“I 'll try it, for all that.”
“Did you ever hear of a man that escaped by swimming?”