The Wild Olive

I

Finding himself in the level wood-road, whose open aisle drew a long,straight streak across the sky, still luminous with the late-lingeringAdirondack twilight, the tall young fugitive, hatless, coatless, andbarefooted, paused a minute for reflection. As he paused, he listened; butall distinctiveness of sound was lost in the play of the wind, up hill anddown dale, through chasm and over crag, in those uncounted leagues offorest. It was only a summer wind, soft and from the south; but its murmurhad the sweep of the eternal breath, while, when it waxed in power, itrose like the swell of some great cosmic organ. Through the pines and inthe underbrush it whispered and crackled and crashed, with a variety ofeffect strangely bewildering to the young man's city-nurtured senses.There were minutes when he felt that not only the four country constableswhom he had escaped were about to burst upon him, but that weird armies ofgnomes were ready to trample him down.

Out of the confusion of wood-noises, in which his unpractised ear coulddistinguish nothing, he waited for a repetition of the shots which a fewhours ago had been the protest of his guards; but, none coming, he sped onagain. He weighed the danger of running in the open against theopportunities for speed, and decided in favor of the latter. Hitherto, inaccordance with a woodcraft invented to meet the emergency, and entirelyhis own, he had avoided anything in the nature of a road or a pathway, inorder to take advantage of the tracklessness which formed his obviousprotection; but now he judged the moment come for putting actual spacebetween his pursuers and himself. How near, or how far behind him, theymight be he could not guess. If he had covered ground, they would havecovered it too, since they were men born to the mountains, while he hadbeen bred in towns. His hope lay in the possibility that in thiswilderness he might be lost to their ken, as a mote is lost in theair—though he built something on the chance that, in sympathy with thefeeling in his favor pervading the simpler population of the region, theyhad given negative connivance to his escape. These thoughts, far fromstimulating a false confidence, urged him to greater speed.

And yet, even as he fled, he had a consciousness of abandoningsomething—perhaps of deserting something—which brought a strain ofregret into this minute of desperate excitement. Without having had timeto count the cost or reckon the result, he felt he was giving up thefight. He, or his counsel for him, had contested the ground with all theresourceful ingenuity known to the American legal practitioner. He wastold that, in spite of the seeming finality of what had happened thatmorning, there were still loopholes through which the defence might becarried on. In the space of a few hours Fate had offere

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