drooping sun was now caught and hidden in its soft embraces. A sudden
chill breathed over the mountain. He shivered, rose, and plunged again
for very warmth into the spice-laden thicket. The heated balsamic air
began to affect him like a powerful sedative; his hunger was forgotten
in the languor of fatigue; he slumbered. When he awoke it was dark. He
groped his way through the thicket. A few stars were shining directly
above him, but beyond and below, everything was lost in the soft, white,
fleecy veil of fog. Whatever light or fire might have betokened human
habitation was hidden. To push on blindly would be madness; he could
only wait for morning. It suited the outcast's lazy philosophy. He crept
back again to his bed in the hollow and slept. In that profound silence
and shadow, shut out from human association and sympathy by the ghostly
fog, what torturing visions conjured up by remorse and fear should have
pursued him? What spirit passed before him, or slowly shaped itself out
of the infinite blackness of the wood? None. As he slipped gently into
that blackness he remembered with a slight regret, some biscuits that
were dropped from the coach by a careless luncheon-consuming passenger.
That pang over, he slept as sweetly, as profoundly, as divinely, as a
child.




CHAPTER II.


He awoke with the aroma of the woods still steeping his senses. His
first instinct was that of all young animals; he seized a few of the
young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena vine that crept over his
mossy pillow and ate them, being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor