Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/254

 "Betrayed!" shouted fifty voices at once, and then there was wild confusion.

"So this mysterious mummery is over at last," said the leader of the Levellers, rising up with rigid limbs, and a scared and whitened face." Now we know why we have all been brought here to-night. Betrayed indeed—and stands the betrayer."

So saying he pointed scornfully at Michael Sunlocks, who stood where he had risen, with the look of deep emotion hardly yet banished from his face by the look of bewilderment that followed it.

"False!" Michael Sunlocks cried. "It is false as hell."

But in that quick instant the people looked at him with changed eyes, and received his words with a groan of rage that silenced him.

The same night Jorgen Jorgensen sailed up the firth, and landing at Reykjavík, took possession of it, and the second Republic of Iceland was at an end. That night, too, when the Fairbrothers, headed by Thurstan, trudged through the streets on their way to Government House, looking to receive the reward that had been promised them, they were elbowed by a drunken company of the Danes who frequented the drinking-shops on the Cheapstead.

"Why, here are his brothers," shouted one of the roysterers, pointing at the Fairbrothers.

"His brothers! His brothers!" shouted twenty more.

Thurstan tried to protest and Jacob to fraternise, but all was useless. The brethren were attacked for the relation they had claimed with the traitor who had fallen, and thus the six worthy souls who had come to Iceland for gain and lost everything, and waited for revenge and only one suspicion, were driven off in peril of their necks, with a drunken mob at full cry behind them.

They took refuge in a coasting schooner setting sail for the eastern firths. Six days afterwards the schooner was caught in the ice at the mouth of Seydisfiord, imprisoned there four months out of reach of help from land or sea, and every soul aboard died miserably.

Short as had been the shrift of Red Jason, the shrift of Michael Sunlocks was yet shorter. On the order of Jorgen Jorgensen the "late usurper of the Government of Iceland" was sent for the term of his natural life to the sulphur-mines that he had himself established as a penal settlement.

And such was the fall of Michael Sunlocks.