ce more he stopped to reflect and take
his bearings. It had grown so dark that there was little danger in doing
so; though, as he peered into the gloom, his nerves were still taut with
the expectation of shot or capture from behind. Straining his eyes, he
made out a few acres that had been cleared for their timber, after which
Nature had been allowed to take her own way again, in unruly growths of
saplings, tangles of wild vines, and clumps of magenta fireweed.

Without quite knowing why he did so, he crept down the slope, feeling his
way among the stumps, and stooping low, lest his white shirt, wet and
clinging limply to his body, might betray him to some keen-eyed marksman.
Presently one of the old root-hedges, common to the countryside, barred
his path--a queer, twisted line of long, gray tentacles that had once
sucked sustenance from the soil, but now reached up idly into a barren
element, where the wild grape was covering their grotesque nakedness with
masses of kindly beauty. Below him he saw lights shining clearly like the
planets, or faintly like the mere star-dust of the sky, while between the
two degrees of brightness he knew there must lie the bosom of the lake. He
had come to the little fringe of towns that clings to the borders of
Champlain, here with the Adirondacks behind him, and there with the
mountains of Vermont, but keeping close to the great, safe waterway, as
though distrusting the ruggedness of both.

It was a moment at which to renew his alarm in this proximity to human
dwellings. Like the tiger that has ventured beyond the edge of the jungle,
he must slink back at the sight of fire. He turned himself slowly, looking
up the heights from which he had come down, as they rolled behind him,
mysterious and hostile, in the growing darkness. Even the sky, from which
it seemed impossible for the daylight ever to depart, now had an angry red
glare in it.

He took a step or two toward the forest, and paused again, still staring
upward. Where was he going? Where _could_ he go? The question presented
itself with an odd pertinence that drew his set, beardless lips into a
kind of smile. When he had first made his rush outward the one thing that
seemed to him essential was to be free; but now he was forced to ask
himself: For what purpose? Of what use was it to be as free as wind if he
was to be as homeless? It was not merely that he was homeless for the
moment; that was nothing; the overwhelming reflection wa