nd long enough for men and shotguns to come up!

From now on he kept straight forward, sometimes walking, sometimes
trotting, sometimes breaking into a run. Now and then he stumbled with
weariness, once he fell face downward. Anybody but a fighter would have
taken to a tree, like an opossum, run at last to shelter.

Out of breath, he came at length to the top of a ridge, and through an
opening in the trees looked across a wooded valley beyond which rose the
lofty undulations of the Tennessee mountains. The clouds had been
growing thin, and now the sun burst through, and flooded those mountains
with light.

"They ain't a-goin' to take me," said the old mountaineer--"not alive!"

Not even the fox waits for hounds to seize him; but, his race over,
turns at bay and dies with his face to his enemies. And now, in the
woods of the extensive bottoms that lay between the ridge and the
mountains, old Tom Abercrombie, his race over, stopped and turned his
face, toward his pursuers.

And as he did so all fear left him. His mind became as clear as the
sparkling sunlight about him. He was no longer a fleeing animal matching
wits with a pursuing one. He was a man standing upright, looking
oncoming fate in the face.

Old Tom did not think of it this way. And yet, perhaps because of some
sense of the fitness of things, he took off his hat and dropped it
beside him. Near at hand a giant sycamore, dead and leafless, rose
loftily above the smaller growth into the sky. Beside this tree he
stood, his white hair and beard dishevelled and glistening in the sun,
his eyes, that had shown a momentary despair when he sprang up from the
log, steady, fierce, undismayed.

If the hound attacked him he would fight--fight with his hands, for he
had no other weapon. If the hound merely bayed him, he would wait until
the guards came up. Their commands he would disregard: he would not even
throw up his hands. He knew what the result would be, he had no
illusions about that: Simmons would kill him.

He did think of Molly. He saw her, all her life tramping back and forth
from the spring to the house, solitary and lonely; he saw the cornfield
in the bottom, where he had ploughed so many springs. He saw the faces
of children and grandchildren, one by one. These things made him choke,
but they had no effect upon his mind: that was made up. Life is good but
it is not worth some things.

All these impressions ran through his mind, swiftly, independent o