It went hard with Lurton. He had been so sure of divine approval and guidance that he had not counted failure possible. But at such times the man of trustful and serene habit has a great advantage. He took the great disappointment as a needed spiritual discipline; he shouldered this load as he had carried all smaller burdens, and went on his way without a murmur. Having resigned his Stillwater pastorate from a conviction that his ministry among red-shirted lumbermen was not a great success, he armed himself with letters from the warden of the prison and the other ministers who had served as chaplains, and, above all, with Mrs. Plausaby's written confession, and set out for Washington. He easily secured money to defray the expense of the journey from Plausaby, who held some funds belonging to his wife's estate, and who yielded to a very gentle pressure from Lurton, knowing how entirely he was in Lurton's power. It is proper to say here that Albert's scrupulous conscience was never troubled about the settlement of his mother's estate. Plausaby had an old will, which bequeathed all to him _in fee simple_. He presented it for probate, and would have succeeded, doubtless, in saving something by acute juggling with his creditors, but that he heard ominous whispers of the real solution of the mystery--where they came from he could not tell. Thinking that Isa was planning his arrest, he suddenly left the country. He turned up afterwards as president of a Nevada silver-mine company, which did a large business in stocks but a small one in dividends; and I have a vague impression that he had something to do with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. His creditors made short work of the property left by Mrs. Plausaby. CHAPTER XXXV. UNBARRED. Lurton was gone six weeks. His letters to Charlton were not very hopeful. People are slow to believe that a court has made a mistake. I who write and you who read get over six weeks as smoothly as we do over six days. But six weeks in grim, gray, yellowish, unplastered, limestone walls, that are so thick and so high and so rough that they are always looking at you in suspicion and with stern threat of resistance! Six weeks in May and June and July inside such walls, where there is scarcely a blade of grass, hardly a cool breeze, not even the song of a bird! A great yard so cursed that the little brown wrens refuse to bless it with their feet! The sound of machinery and of the hammers of unwilling toilers, but no mellow voice of robin or chatter of gossiping chimney-swallows! To Albert they were six weeks of alternate hope and fear, and of heart-sickness.