as he understood it, was to win these men back to fitness for service to
the society which had shut them up for their misdeeds. They were not
wild beasts. They were human beings who had made a misstep. Sometimes he
had been able to influence men strongly, but he felt that it had not been
true of this puncher from the cow country.

Sanders walked slowly out of the office and through the door in the wall
that led back to life. He was free. To-morrow was his. All the to-morrows
of all the years of his life were waiting for him. But the fact stirred
in him no emotion. As he stood in the dry Colorado sunshine his heart was
quite dead.

In the earlier days of his imprisonment it had not been so. He had
dreamed often of this hour. At night, in the darkness of his cell,
imagination had projected picture after picture of it, vivid, colorful,
set to music. But his parole had come too late. The years had taken
their toll of him. The shadow of the prison had left its chill, had done
something to him that had made him a different David Sanders from the boy
who had entered. He wondered if he would ever learn to laugh again, if he
would ever run to meet life eagerly as that other David Sanders had a
thousand years ago.

He followed the road down to the little station and took a through train
that came puffing out of the Royal Gorge on its way to the plains.
Through the crowd at the Denver depot he passed into the city, moving
up Seventeenth Street without definite aim or purpose. His parole had
come unexpectedly, so that none of his friends could meet him even if
they had wanted to do so. He was glad of this. He preferred to be alone,
especially during these first days of freedom. It was his intention to go
back to Malapi, to the country he knew and loved, but he wished to pick
up a job in the city for a month or two until he had settled into a frame
of mind in which liberty had become a habit.

Early next morning he began his search for work. It carried him to a
lumber yard adjoining the rail

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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