kens being dragged along the
village street amid the jeers of the people. Swallows fluttered in the
chimney, and I heard there the echoes of the struggle when the
constable laid his hand on the shoulders of my friend. The wind moaned
in the trees, and I fancied Penelope now upbraiding me for the trouble
I had brought upon them, now pleading with me to send her father home
to her. A faint crowing sounded from the orchard, hailing the shadow
of the morning, the gray ghost rising from the dark ridges. I slipped
from my bed to the window, and watched the valley as it shook itself
from sleep. How slowly came that day! The birds stirred in their
nests, but, like me, they dared not venture forth into a world so
filled with uncanny shadows. Yet the day did come. Over by the dark,
towering wall that hemmed in the valley the gray turned to pink, and I
could see the trees on the ridge-top like a fringe against the
brightening sky. Louder sounded the crowing in the orchard, and to me
it brought a warning that I must hurry. I looked to the northward, and
saw only the mists covering the land, and in my fancy beyond them the
mountains where bear and wildcat lurked. There the Professor and
Penelope lay unconscious that even now the terrible warrant might be
issuing and at any moment would fall upon them. There was only one
thing for me to do, and though when I had closed the house door softly
behind me and turned my back to the reddening east the mists were
tenfold more mysterious and the mountains tenfold more forbidding, I
ran straight down the road into the gloom, as though the warrant were
racing with me.

CHAPTER IV

When with a last desperate spurt I ran into the clearing, I saw the
Professor sitting in the cabin door, smoking his pipe and basking in
the sunshine as though life held no trouble for him. I believed that I
was in time to warn him of the threatening danger, that I had outsped
the warrant, that I had outrun the redoubtable Lukens, and in the
luxury of that thought my overtaxed strength ebbed away and I sank down
on a stump, hot and panting. I had run a hard race for so small a boy.
At times it seemed as though the mountains drew back from me, that
every one of the five miles had stretched to ten, but I kept bravely
on, going at top speed over the level places, dragging wearily up the
steep hills, cutting through fields and woods where I could save
distance, following every brief rest with a spasm