"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.