Which mental attitude was fortunate, indeed; for it, and it alone, preserved the girl from a wild blare of newspaper notoriety.  Had the truth been known, who could have imagined the results?

For a long time after the girl had departed, Gabriel sat there in his cell, motionless and sunk in deepest thought.  His emotions passed recording.  That this woman, his ideal, his best-beloved, the cherished, inmost treasure of his heart and soul—­she whom he had rescued, she who had lain in his arms and shared with him that unforgettable hour in the old sugar-house—­should now prove to be the daughter of his bitterest enemy, surpassed belief and stunned all clear understanding.

Flint!  The very name connoted, for Gabriel, all that was cruel and rapacious, hateful, vicious and greedy; all that meant pain and woe and death to him and his class.  Visions of West Virginia and Colorado rose before his mind.  He heard again the whistle of the “Bull Moose Death Special” as it sped on its swift errand of barbarism up Cabin Creek, hurling its sprays of leaden death among the slaves of this man and his vulturine associates.

Flint!  He whispered the name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs and gunmen, ghouls in human form!  He saw the pits of death, where the charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay in mute protest under the far Colorado sky.  And more he saw, east and west, north and south, of this man’s inhuman work; and his thoughts, projected into the future, dwelt bitterly on the Air Trust now already under way—­the terrible, coming slavery which he, Gabriel, had struggled to checkmate, only to find himself locked like a rat in a steel trap!

“And this woman,” he groaned in agony of soul, “this woman, all in all to me, is—­is his daughter!”

Flinging himself upon his hard and narrow bunk, he buried his head in his powerful arms, and tried to blot out thought from his fevered brain; but still the current ran on and on and on, endlessly, maddeningly.  And to the problem, no answer seemed to come.

“She must know who I am,” he pondered.  “Even if her father has not told her, the papers have.  True, she doesn’t believe the infamous charge against me; but what then?  Can she, on the other hand, believe the truth, that her father has conspired with Slade and those Cosmos thugs, and with the press and courts and the whole damnable prostituted system, to suppress and kill me?

“Can she believe her father guilty of all that?  And of all the horrors of this capitalist Hell, that I have told her about?  No!  Human nature is incapable of such vast turnings from all the habits and environments of a lifetime.  In her veins flows the blood of that arch-criminal, Flint.  Her thoughts must be, to some extent, his thoughts.  She must share his viewpoint, and be loyal to him.  After this first flush of reaction against her father, she will go back to him.  It is inevitable.  Betwixt her and me is fixed a boundless space, wider than Heaven and earth.  She is one pole, and I the other.  If I have any strength or resolution or philosophy, now is the hour for its trial.