He steered himself by the peak of Graytop, black against the last
coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star. There was
further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a circle,
when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward and saw the
pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot straight behind him.
There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like
himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied
instinct to return that the driven stag must feel toward the bed of fern
from which he has been roused. But, for the minute, there was one
imperative necessity--to go on--to go on anywhere, anyhow, so long as it
took him far enough from the spot where masked men had loosed the
handcuffs from his wrists and stray shots had come ringing after him. In
his path there were lakelets, which he swam, and streams, which he forded.
Over the low hills he scrambled through an undergrowth so dense that even
the snake or the squirrel might have avoided it, to find some easier way.
Now and then, as he dragged himself up the more barren ascents, the loose
soil gave way beneath his steps in miniature avalanches of stone and sand,
over which he crept, clinging to tufts of grass or lightly rooted
saplings, to rise at last with hands scratched and feet bleeding. Then, on
again!--frantically, as the hare runs and as the crow flies, without
swerving--on, with the sole aim of gaining time and covering distance!

He was not a native of the mountains. Though in the two years spent among
them he had come to acknowledge their charm, it was only as a man learns
to love an alien mistress, whose alternating moods of savagery and
softness hold him with a spell of which he is half afraid. More than any
one suspected or he could have explained, his reckless life had been the
rebellion of his man-trained, urban instinct against the domination of
this supreme earth-force, to which he was of no more value than a falling