carried on. In the space of a few hours Fate had offered him the choice
between two courses, neither of them fertile in promises of success. The
one was long and tedious, with a possibility of ultimate justification;
the other short and speedy, with the accepted imputation of guilt. He had
chosen the latter--instinctively and on the spur of the moment; and while
he might have repeated at leisure the decision he had made in haste, he
knew even now that he was leaving the ways and means of proving his
innocence behind him. The perception came, not as the result of a process
of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected sensation.

He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than
mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually gathers
strength, as it rolls inland, to toss up the crests of the Adirondacks.
Here, burying himself in the woods, he skirted the unkempt farms, whose
cottage lights, just beginning to burn, served him as signals to keep
farther off. When forced to cross one of the sterile fields, he crawled
low, blotting himself out among the bowlders. At times a patch of tall,
tasselled Indian corn, interlaced with wandering pumpkin vines, gave him
cover, till he regained the shelter of the vast Appalachian mother-forest
which, after climbing Cumberlands, Alleghanies, Catskills, and
Adirondacks, here clambers down, in long reaches of ash and maple, juniper
and pine, toward the lowlands of the north.

As far as he had yet been able to formulate a plan of flight, it was to
seek his safety among the hills. The necessity of the instant was driving
him toward the open country and the lake, but he hoped to double soon upon
his tracks, finding his way back to the lumber camps, whose friendly
spiriting from bunk-house to bunk-house would baffle pursuit. Once he had
gained even a few hours' security, he would be able to some extent to pick
and choose his way.