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.