The sergeant turned quietly and walked out of the room. He went down the corridor toward the window that overlooked the court-yard, where everything was black but for occasional patches of moonlight. The grief and horror with which he was overcome had an added sting of conscience. He was an unlettered man, and was not used to arguing morals with himself. He felt oppressed with guilt at allowing Kaintuck to go to his grave without knowing how things really were. But some instinctive common sense restrained him. It would only add a last cruelty of fate to tell him that he had been forgotten and supplanted; and the sergeant, after looking at Kaintuck closely, had adopted the chaplain's opinion that Kaintuck was not long for this world. He did not know how long he had stood at the window, when he became calmer, and returned along the corridor. The lamp was turned up in Kaintuck's cell, and there were two or three men standing over the bed. "Sinkin' spells. Doctors workin' with him," sententiously remarked the guard to the sergeant, pausing a moment in his regular tramp. Every day after that the sergeant came to see Kaintuck, and every day Kaintuck's face grew more pinched, and his eyes larger and more pathetic. The doctors first wheedled, then grew angry and scolded Kaintuck. Sometimes he would take the food and medicine prescribed for him, and again he would not; but all the time he traveled steadily toward the grave. Occasionally he endured furious agonies of pain from his wounded jaw, which had suddenly grown violent again; and following that he would lie for hours completely free from pain, and apparently entirely at peace. But the poor sergeant was never at peace. A trouble, a shade, that took the form of an accusing spirit, walked with him all day, and lay down by his side at night. And if Mary should come! The sergeant's heart leaped up into his throat at the bare idea. Nevertheless he haunted the prison and Kaintuck's cell, even when he was not on duty. One afternoon, when Kaintuck had been feebler than usual, sitting by his bed, something like atonement seemed possible to the sergeant. "Kaintuck," he said, "may be you're troubled in your mind about that boy?" "I ought to be, but I ain't," answered Kaintuck, who shared the delusion of his class that all humanity should be troubled of many things, and should cherish grief and coddle sorrow. "I say, sergeant, that 'ere little sheep-faced preacher has made me feel different about things. He sets there where you is settin', an' talks to me kinder manly. I ain't never been converted"--here he blushed--"but--but the chaplain he says 'tain't how we _feel_ so much as how we do. He says God will take keer of the child, and his mother too, an' sergeant, I believe it."