, it strode away across the hill.

She did not analyze the audacious trick by which the man had turned
to his advantage the subtle effects of the expected and the obvious;
she was still under the cloud of more individual complexities, and
she noticed most of all that the vanishing scarecrow did not even
turn to look at the farm. And the fates that were running so adverse
to his fantastic career of freedom ruled that his next adventure,
though it had the same success in another quarter, should increase
the danger in this quarter. Among the many similar adventures
related of him in this manner it is also said that some days
afterward another girl, named Mary Cregan, found him concealed on
the farm where she worked; and if the story is true, she must also
have had the shock of an uncanny experience, for when she was busy
at some lonely task in the yard she heard a voice speaking out of
the well, and found that the eccentric had managed to drop himself
into the bucket which was some little way below, the well only
partly full of water. In this case, however, he had to appeal to the
woman to wind up the rope. And men say it was when this news was
told to the other woman that her soul walked over the border line of
treason.

Such, at least, were the stories told of him in the countryside, and
there were many more--as that he had stood insolently in a splendid
green dressing gown on the steps of a great hotel, and then led the
police a chase through a long suite of grand apartments, and finally
through his own bedroom on to a balcony that overhung the river. The
moment the pursuers stepped on to the balcony it broke under them,
and they dropped pell-mell into the eddying waters, while Michael,
who had thrown off his gown and dived, was able to swim away. It was
said that he had carefully cut away the props so that they would not
support anything so heavy as a policeman. But here again he was
immediately fortunate, yet ultimately unfortunate, for it is said
that one of the men was drowned, leaving a family feud which made a
little rift in his popularity. These stories can now be told in some
detail, not because they are the most marvelous of his many
adventures, but because these alone were not covered with silence by
the loyalty of the peasantry. These alone found their way into
official reports, and it is these which three of the chief officials
of the country were reading and discussing when the more remarkable
part of th