What little strength I had was loosened from my joints, and more than
half-senseless I fell full length upon my back. Farallone had foiled our
attack by the simple method of catching us by the hair and knocking our
heads together.

I could hear his great mocking laugh resounding through the forest.

"Let him go," I heard the groom moan.

The bride laughed. It was a very curious laugh. I could not make it out.
There seemed to be no anger in it, and yet how, I wondered, could there
be anything else?

IV

When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's
laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing
her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a
man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.

"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make
that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we
get somewhere."

The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white,
acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started--_bolted_
is the better word.

For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of
the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where
it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a
splashing stumble. The bride met her various mishaps with a kind of
silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me
think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon
her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to
me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the
humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had
struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her
willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost
spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you
would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be
ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept
giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's
loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash--dash--damn, look
out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and
held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her
face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his
courtesies, and the whole punctilious f