Ordering his men to their work, Melville and Sprigley stood apart, and
for nearly an hour engaged in the most earnest conversation. The
afternoon was shadow-flaked and paling when they had finished, and
before Sprigley led his men back within the gray walls he had arranged
for Melville to come to the prison after the dinner hour and confer with
Mitchell, the warden.

Many and important were the developments arising from this latter
conference. One of the least of them was that Melville's northward
journey was postponed for some days, and that within a week this same
white-haired, lean old man, dressed in the garb of the cinder trail, was
pleading his case to no less a personage than the governor of the State
of Washington in whom authority for dealing with Ben's case was
absolutely vested. It came about, from the same cause, that a noted
alienist, Forest, of Seattle, visited Ben Darby in his cell; and finally
that the prisoner himself, under the strict guard of Sprigley, was taken
to the capital at Olympia.

The brief inquisition that followed, changing the entire current of Ben
Darby's life, occurred in the private office of McNamara, the Governor.
McNamara himself stood up to greet them when they entered, the guard and
the convict. Ezra Melville and Forest, the alienist from Seattle, were
already in session. The latter conducted the examination.

He tried his subject first on some of the most simple tests for sanity.
It became evident at once, however, that except for his amnesia Ben's
mind was perfectly sound: he passed all general intelligence tests with
a high score, he conversed easily, he talked frankly of his symptoms. He
had perfect understanding of the general sweep of events in the past
twenty years: his amnesia seemed confined to his own activities and the