Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/300

 And Jason answered, with heat and flame of voice, "Because I hate and loathe him."

"Has he wronged you also?" said Sunlocks.

"Yes," said Jason, "and I have waited and watched five years to requite him."

"Have you never yet met with him?"

"Never! But I'll see him now. And if he denies me this justice I'll"——

"What?"

At that Jason paused and then said quickly, "No matter."

But Sunlocks understood him, and cried, "God forbid it."

Half-an-hour later Red Jason, still carrying Michael Sunlocks, was passing through the Great Rift, the Chasm of All Men, a grand, gloomy, diabolical fissure, opening into the valley of Thingvellir. It was morning of the day following that of his escape from the sulphur-mines of Krisuvik. The air was clear, the sun was bright, and a dull sound, such as the sea makes when far away, came up from the plain below. It was a deep multitudinous hum of many voices. Jason heard it, and his heavy face lightened with the vividness of a grim joy.

now, that we may stride on the faster, we must step back a pace or two. What happened to Greeba after she parted from her father at Krisuvik, and took up her employment as nurse to the sick prisoners, we partly know already from the history of Red Jason and Michael Sunlocks. Accused of unchastity, she was turned away from the hospital; and suspected of collusion to effect the escape of some prisoner unrecognised, she was ordered to leave the neighbourhood of the sulphur-mines. But where her affections are at stake a woman's wit is more than a match for a man's cunning, and Greeba contrived to remain in Krisuvik. For her material needs she still had the larger part of the money that her brothers, in their scheming selfishness, had brought her, and she had her child to cheer her solitude. It was a boy, unchristened as yet, save in the secret place of her heart, where it bore a name that she dare not speak. And if its life was her shame in the eyes of the good folk who gave