THE ODD ADVENTURE WHICH BEFELL YOUNG LYNDE IN THE HILL COUNTRY


It had all happened so suddenly that one or two minutes passed before
Edward Lynde took in the full enormity of Mary's desertion. A dim smile
was still hovering about his lips when the yellow speck that was Mary
faded into the gray distance; then his countenance fell. There was no
sign of mortal habitation visible from the hillside where he stood; the
farm at which he had spent the night was five miles away; his stiff
riding-boots were ill-adapted to pedestrianism. The idea of lugging that
heavy saddle five miles over a mountain road caused him to knit his
brows and look very serious indeed. As he gave the saddle an impatient
kick, his eyes rested on the Bologna sausage, one end of which protruded
from the holster; then there came over him a poignant recollection of
his Lenten supper of the night before and his no breakfast at all of
that morning. He seated himself on the saddle, unwrapped the sausage,
and proceeded to cut from it two or three thin slices.

"It might have been much worse," he reflected, as he picked off with his
penknife the bits of silver foil which adhered to the skin of the
sausage; "if Mary had decamped with the commissary stores, that would
have been awkward." Lynde devoured the small pieces of pressed meat with
an appetite born of his long fast and the bracing upland air.

"Talk about pate de foie gras!" he exclaimed, with a sweep of his arm,
as if he were disdainfully waving back a menial bearing a tray of
Strasbourg pates; "if I live to return to Rivermouth I will have Bologna
sausage three times a day for the rest of my life."

A cup of the ice-cold water which bubbled up from a boss of cresses by