While Pedro de Armijo walked on the parapet, looking out at the range of mountain and valley and enjoying the sunlight, which would soon be gone, a young man stood at the window of cell No. 87, also looking out at the mountain, although no sunlight reached him there. He gazed through a slit four inches wide and twelve inches high, and the solid wall of masonry through which this slit was cut was twelve feet thick. The young man’s ankles were tied together with a chain which, although long enough to allow him to walk, weighed twenty-five pounds. Once he had been chained with another man. Formerly the prisoners who had been brought with him to the Castle of Montevideo had been chained in pairs, the chain in no case weighing less than twenty pounds, but, since only John Bedford was left, Pedro de Armijo concluded that it was his duty to carry the chain alone. John Bedford was white with prison pallor. Although as tall, he weighed many pounds less than his younger brother, Philip. His cheeks were sunken, and his eyes were set in deep hollows. The careless observer would have taken him for ten years more than his real age. He had shuffled painfully to the slit in the wall, where he wished to see the last rays of the daylight falling on the mountainside. The depth of the slit made the section of the mountain that he could see very narrow, and he knew every inch of it. There was the big projection of volcanic rock, the tall, malformed cactus that put out a white flower, the little bunch of stunted cedars or pines--he could never tell which--in the shelter of the rock, and the yard or two of gully down which he had seen the water roaring after the big rains or at the melting of the snows on the Cofre de Montevideo. How often he had looked upon these things! What a little slice of the world it was! Only a few yards long and fewer yards broad, but what a mighty thing it was to him! Even with the slit closed, he could have drawn all of it upon a map to the last twig and pebble. He would have suffered intensely had that little view been withdrawn, but it tantalized him, too, with the sight of the freedom that was denied him. Three years, they told him, he had been gazing out at that narrow slit at the mountainside, and he only at the beginning of life, strong of mind and body--or at least he was. Never in that time had he been outside the inner walls or even in the court yard. He knew nothing of what had happened in the world. Sometimes they told him that Texas had been overrun and retaken by the Mexicans, and he feared that it was true.