"Perez?"

"Yes, it is I, George," said the soldier, his eyes filling with
compassionate tears. "How came you in this horrible place?"

But before Fennell could answer the other prisoner sprang to the side
of the speaker, clutching his arm in his claw-like fingers, and crying
in an anguished voice:

"Perez; brother Perez. Don't you know me?"

At the voice Perez started as if a bullet had reached his heart. Like
lightning he turned, his face, frozen with fear, that was scarcely yet
comprehended, his eyes like darts. From that white filthy face in its
wild beast's mat of hair, his brother's eyes were looking into his.

"Lord, God in Heaven!" It was a husky, struggling voice, scarcely more
than a whisper in which he uttered the words. For several seconds the
brothers stood gazing into each other's countenances, Reuben holding
Perez' arm and he half shrinking, not from his brother, though such
was the attitude, but from the horror of the discovery.

"How long" he began to ask, and then his voice broke. The emaciated
figure before him, the face bleached with the ghastly pallor which a
sunless prison gives, the deep sunken eyes looking like coals of fire,
eating their way into his brain, the tattered clothing, the long
unkempt hair and beard, prematurely whitening, and filled with filth,
the fingers grown claw-like and blue, with prison mould, the dull
vacant look and the thought that this was Reuben, his brother; these
things all filled him with such an unutterable, intolerable pity, that