"I'm obleeged ter ye," he answered in a dead voice of mock humility, though his tongue ached to burst into profane denunciation, "but I hain't axed nobody ter do nothin'. I didn't 'low ter be beholden ter nobody." "You are 'beholden' to everybody who has befriended you," retorted the warden with rising asperity. "Do you mean to go back to the mountains?" At once there leaped into the released convict's mind a vision of being spied upon and thwarted in his purpose--a purpose which the law could not countenance. To cover his anger he fell into a fit of violent coughing, and, when he answered, it was with the crafty semblance of indecision. "I 'lowed I mout go back an' see my kinfolks fer a spell." "And after that?" "I 'lowed," lied Spooner cautiously, "thet atter thet I'd go West." "Now take a tip from me," commanded the warden, and, since he still held the five-dollar bill, the boy from Troublesome was forced to accord unwilling attention. "Every mountain man that goes away drifts eventually back to the mountains. God knows why they do it, but they do. You have just one chance of salvation. I had that in mind when I spoke to the Governor and asked him to include in your pardon a restoration of civil rights. If you get well enough to stand the physical examination, enlist in the army. Once in, you'll have to stay three years--and in three years a fellow can do a lot of thinking. It may make a man of you. If you don't take that tip I'll have you back here again--as sure as God made you--unless you get hanged instead." The warden extended his hand containing the provision with which the commonwealth of Kentucky invited this human brandling to rehabilitate his life. The mountaineer bent eagerly forward and clutched at the money with a wolfish haste of greed. Ten minutes later the prison gates swung outward. The Frankfort Penitentiary sits on a hill looking down to a ragged town which straddles the Kentucky River. In the basin below somnolent streets spread away and lose themselves in glistening turnpikes between bluegrass farms where velvet lawns and shaded woodlands surround old mansions that mirror the charm and flavor of rural England. The state capital is a large village rather than a city, but to this boy who had known only the wild isolation of the Cumberlands, where sky-high ramparts have caught and arrested human development, Frankfort seemed a baffling metropolis. In the lumber-yards and distilleries that cluttered the steep river banks he saw only bewilderment and in the dome of the capitol the symbol of a power that had jailed him; that except for his youth would have hanged him.