The Wild Olive | Page 2

gathers strength, as it rolls inland, to toss up the crests of the
Adirondacks. Here, burying himself in the woods, he skirted the
unkempt farms, whose cottage lights, just beginning to burn, served
him as signals to keep farther off. When forced to cross one of the
sterile fields, he crawled low, blotting himself out among the bowlders.
At times a patch of tall, tasselled Indian corn, interlaced with
wandering pumpkin vines, gave him cover, till he regained the shelter
of the vast Appalachian mother-forest which, after climbing
Cumberlands, Alleghanies, Catskills, and Adirondacks, here clambers
down, in long reaches of ash and maple, juniper and pine, toward the
lowlands of the north.
As far as he had yet been able to formulate a plan of flight, it was to
seek his safety among the hills. The necessity of the instant was driving
him toward the open country and the lake, but he hoped to double soon
upon his tracks, finding his way back to the lumber camps, whose
friendly spiriting from bunk-house to bunk-house would baffle pursuit.
Once he had gained even a few hours' security, he would be able to
some extent to pick and choose his way.
He steered himself by the peak of Graytop, black against the last
coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star. There was
further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a
circle, when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward

and saw the pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot
straight behind him. There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear,
and the outlaw like himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was
with the same frenzied instinct to return that the driven stag must feel
toward the bed of fern from which he has been roused. But, for the
minute, there was one imperative necessity--to go on--to go on
anywhere, anyhow, so long as it took him far enough from the spot
where masked men had loosed the handcuffs from his wrists and stray
shots had come ringing after him. In his path there were lakelets, which
he swam, and streams, which he forded. Over the low hills he
scrambled through an undergrowth so dense that even the snake or the
squirrel might have avoided it, to find some easier way. Now and then,
as he dragged himself up the more barren ascents, the loose soil gave
way beneath his steps in miniature avalanches of stone and sand, over
which he crept, clinging to tufts of grass or lightly rooted saplings, to
rise at last with hands scratched and feet bleeding. Then, on
again!--frantically, as the hare runs and as the crow flies, without
swerving--on, with the sole aim of gaining time and covering distance!
He was not a native of the mountains. Though in the two years spent
among them he had come to acknowledge their charm, it was only as a
man learns to love an alien mistress, whose alternating moods of
savagery and softness hold him with a spell of which he is half afraid.
More than any one suspected or he could have explained, his reckless
life had been the rebellion of his man-trained, urban instinct against the
domination of this supreme earth-force, to which he was of no more
value than a falling leaf or a dissolving cloud. Even now, as he flung
himself on the forest's protection, it was not with the solace of the son
returning to the mother; it was rather as a man might take refuge from a
lion in a mammoth cavern, where the darkness only conceals dangers.
After the struggle with crude nature the smooth, grass-carpeted
wagon-track brought him more than a physical sense of comfort. It not
only made his flight swift and easy, but it had been marked out by man,
for man's purposes and to meet man's need. It was the result of a human
intelligence; it led to a human goal. It was possible that it might lead
even him into touch with human sympathies With the thought, he

became conscious all at once that he was famished and fatigued. Up to
the present he had been as little aware of a body as a spirit on its way
between two worlds. It had ached and sweated and bled; but he had not
noticed it. The electric fluid could not have seemed more tireless or
iron more insensate. But now, when the hardship was somewhat
relaxed, he was forced back on the perception that he was faint and
hungry His speed slackened; his shoulders sagged; the long second
wind, which had lasted so well, began to shorten. For the first time it
occurred to him to wonder how long his strength