"Stand up at your door until the bull makes the count," imparted Last Time, as he hurried along the tier looking into each cell. Then he came back, and pulling a great lever at the end of the tier, locked all the doors automatically. Now he started back, again calling into the cells as he passed. "Stand up--stand up--stand up!" A big guard followed close behind the convict, with a gliding tread that did not give forth the slightest sound. He dashed a cold, penetrating stare in at the faces that hovered at the bars. When the guards had made the count for the night, a babble of conversation began between the prisoners all over the place. They called to each other by the cell numbers, or nicknames; and the talk waxed to an incoherent, mixed medley that tangled itself into nothing intelligible. Though strange to record, this did not seem to bother or confuse those talking. The door of Lem's cell seemed to be as sensitive to every sound as a telephone receiver. A voice at the farthest end of the corridor trailed into Lem's cell as distinctly as a voice two cells away. Thus, a sound two cells away might be interpreted as emanating from the remotest cell in the place. Lem, sad, dejected, and with a weight of gloom at his heart that submerged his spirit and held him in a lethargy, still stood at the door with his fingers twined around the chill bars. His eyes, starry with the emotions that swept over him, were fixed upon the only thing he could see--the blank stone wall opposite, laced with a series of steam pipes, and the high windows blotted with a skein of iron. CHAPTER XII THE STIGMA He was in jail now--he, Lem Lutts,--old Cap Lutts' boy--was gunless to-night; hanging on to the bars of a jail door. His father, seventy-six when he fell in the Church of Hellsfork, had never been in a jail. Crowding up amidst other lamentations, and superseding them for the moment, Lem felt keenly the stigma and sting of this scandal. It was a disgrace on the whole Lutts faction that he, their leader, now should stand behind the iron bars of a jail door. The irony of it was deeply excruciating--that he, their chieftain, should succumb to a revenuer. Moreover, was it not unspeakably shameful that this revenuer who took him was the man who had invaded his home and killed his mother? He had waited a little and killed his father. Then he tore him away from his domain and his people; and caged him where he stood to-night--gunless, in an iron and concrete hole, with the cold, unyielding bars between him and his free, wide, high Cumberland Kingdom.