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The Wild Olive by Basil King
page 3 of 353 (00%)
whom he had escaped were about to burst upon him, but that weird armies of
gnomes were ready to trample him down.

Out of the confusion of wood-noises, in which his unpractised ear could
distinguish nothing, he waited for a repetition of the shots which a few
hours ago had been the protest of his guards; but, none coming, he sped on
again. He weighed the danger of running in the open against the
opportunities for speed, and decided in favor of the latter. Hitherto, in
accordance with a woodcraft invented to meet the emergency, and entirely
his own, he had avoided anything in the nature of a road or a pathway, in
order to take advantage of the tracklessness which formed his obvious
protection; but now he judged the moment come for putting actual space
between his pursuers and himself. How near, or how far behind him, they
might be he could not guess. If he had covered ground, they would have
covered it too, since they were men born to the mountains, while he had
been bred in towns. His hope lay in the possibility that in this
wilderness he might be lost to their ken, as a mote is lost in the
air--though he built something on the chance that, in sympathy with the
feeling in his favor pervading the simpler population of the region, they
had given negative connivance to his escape. These thoughts, far from
stimulating a false confidence, urged him to greater speed.

And yet, even as he fled, he had a consciousness of abandoning
something--perhaps of deserting something--which brought a strain of
regret into this minute of desperate excitement. Without having had time
to count the cost or reckon the result, he felt he was giving up the
fight. He, or his counsel for him, had contested the ground with all the
resourceful ingenuity known to the American legal practitioner. He was
told that, in spite of the seeming finality of what had happened that
morning, there were still loopholes through which the defence might be
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