smote him with fierce pangs, but back of it all was his sense of
bitter loss, his desolation, and his loneliness.

"I couldn't forget Uncle Bob if I tried--" he told himself, with
quivering lips, as he limped wearily along the dusty road, and
the tears welled up and streaked his pinched face. Now before
him he saw the scattered lights of a settlement. All his
terrors, the terrors that grouped themselves about the idea of
pursuit and capture, rushed back upon him, and in a panic he
plunged into the black woods again.

But the distant lights intensified his loneliness. He had lived
a whole day without food, a whole day without speech. He began
to skirt the settlement, keeping well within the thick gloom of
the woods, and presently, as he stumbled forward, he came to a
small clearing in the center of which stood a log dwelling. The
place seemed deserted. There was no sign of life, no light shone
from the window, no smoke issued from the stick-and-mud chimney.

Tilted back in a chair by the door of this house a man was
sleeping. The hoot of an owl from a near-by oak roused him. He
yawned and stretched himself, thrusting out his fat legs and
extending his great arms. Then becoming aware of the small
figure which had stolen up the path as he slept and now stood
before him in the uncertain light, he fell to rubbing his eyes
with the knuckles of his plump hands. The pale night mist out of
the silent depths of the forest had assumed shapes as strange.

"Who are you?" he demanded, and his voice rumbled thickly forth
from his capacious chest. The very sound was sleek and unctuous.