"Boy, boy," said the father, mingling his sobs with those of his son, "help me to bear it!"
It was a piteous appeal, and it reached the boy's heart. At once he loosened one hand from its hold, put it up and stroked his father's face as his sobs grew quiet. At the touch upon his face, the father straightened himself up, gently removed his son's clinging arm from his neck.
"My son," he said quietly, "we must be men. The men of our blood meet not death so."
Immediately the boy slipped from his father's arms and stood erect and quiet, looking up into the dark face above him watchful for the next word or sign. The father waved his hand toward the door.
"We now say farewell," he said quietly. He stooped down, kissed his son gravely and tenderly first upon the lips, then upon the brow, walked with him to the barred door.
"We are ready," he said quietly to the guard who stood near by.
The boy passed out, and gave his hand to Paulina, who stood waiting for him.
"Simon Ketzel," said Kalmar, as he bade him farewell, "you will befriend my boy?"
"Master, brother," said Simon, "I will serve your children with my life." He knelt, kissed the prisoner's hand, and went out.
That afternoon, the name of Michael Kalmar was entered upon the roll of the Provincial Penitentiary, and he took up his burden of life, no longer a man, but a mere human animal driven at the will of some petty tyrant, doomed to toil without reward, to isolation from all that makes life dear, to deprivation of the freedom of God's sweet light and air, to degradation without hope of recovery. Before him stretched fourteen long years of slow agony, with cruel abundance of leisure to feed his soul with maddening memories of defeated vengeance, with fearful anxieties for the future of those dear as life, with feelings of despair over a cause for which he had sacrificed his all.