dark, and
as he looked out of the window, Lansing saw an officer and a number of
other persons approaching the house. They were coming to arrest him.
Animal terror, the instinct of self-preservation, seized upon his
faculties, stunned and demoralized as he was by the suddenness with
which this calamity had come upon him. He opened the door and fled,
with a score of men and boys yelling in pursuit. He ran wildly, blindly,
making incredible leaps and bounds over obstacles. As men sometimes do
in nightmares, he argued with himself, as he ran, whether this could
possibly be a waking experience, and inclined to think that it could
not. It must be a dream. It was too fantastically horrible to be
anything else.

Presently he saw just before him the eddying, swirling current of the
river, swollen by a freshet. Still half convinced that he was in a
nightmare, and, if he could but shake it off, should awake in his warm
bed, he plunged headlong in, and was at once swirled out of sight of his
pursuers beneath the darkening sky. A blow from a floating object caused
him to throw up his arms, and, clutching something solid, he clambered
upon a shed carried away by the freshet from an up-river farm. All night
he drifted with the swift current, and in the morning landed in safety
thirty miles below the village from which he had fled for life.

So John Lansing, for no fault whatever except an error of judgment, if
even it was that, was banished from home, and separated from his family
almost as hopelessly as if he were dead. To return would be to meet an
accusation of murder to which his flight had added overwhelming weight.
To write to his wife might be to put the officers of the law, who
doubtless watched her closely, upon his scent.

Under an assumed name he made his way to the far West, and, joining the
rush to the silver mines of Colorado, was among the lucky ones. At the
end of three years he was a rich man. What he had made the money for, he
could not tell, except that the engrossment of the struggle had helped
him to forget his wretchedness. Not that he ever did forget it. His
wife and babies, from whose embraces he had been so suddenly torn,
were always in his thoughts. Above all, he could not forget the look of
horror in his wife's eyes in that last terrible scene. To see her again,
and convince her, if not others, that he was innocent, was a need which
so grew upon him that, at the end of three years, he determined to take