The Wild Olive | Page 3

would hold out.
It was then that he noticed a deflection of the wood-road toward the
north, and down over the brow of the plateau on which for a mile or
two its evenness had been sustained. It was a new sign that it was
tending toward some habitation. Half an hour ago he would have taken
this to mean that he must dash into the forest again; but half an hour
ago he had not been hungry. He did not say to himself that he would
venture to any man's door and ask for bread. So far as he knew, he
would never venture to any man's door again; nevertheless, he kept on,
down-hill, and down-hill nearer and nearer the lake, and farther and
farther from the mountain and the lairs of safety.
Suddenly, at a turning, when he was not expecting it, the wood-road
emerged into a rough clearing. Once more he stopped to reflect and
take his bearings. It had grown so dark that there was little danger in
doing so; though, as he peered into the gloom, his nerves were still taut
with the expectation of shot or capture from behind. Straining his eyes,
he made out a few acres that had been cleared for their timber, after
which Nature had been allowed to take her own way again, in unruly
growths of saplings, tangles of wild vines, and clumps of magenta
fireweed.
Without quite knowing why he did so, he crept down the slope, feeling
his way among the stumps, and stooping low, lest his white shirt, wet
and clinging limply to his body, might betray him to some keen-eyed
marksman. Presently one of the old root-hedges, common to the
countryside, barred his path--a queer, twisted line of long, gray
tentacles that had once sucked sustenance from the soil, but now

reached up idly into a barren element, where the wild grape was
covering their grotesque nakedness with masses of kindly beauty.
Below him he saw lights shining clearly like the planets, or faintly like
the mere star-dust of the sky, while between the two degrees of
brightness he knew there must lie the bosom of the lake. He had come
to the little fringe of towns that clings to the borders of Champlain, here
with the Adirondacks behind him, and there with the mountains of
Vermont, but keeping close to the great, safe waterway, as though
distrusting the ruggedness of both.
It was a moment at which to renew his alarm in this proximity to
human dwellings. Like the tiger that has ventured beyond the edge of
the jungle, he must slink back at the sight of fire. He turned himself
slowly, looking up the heights from which he had come down, as they
rolled behind him, mysterious and hostile, in the growing darkness.
Even the sky, from which it seemed impossible for the daylight ever to
depart, now had an angry red glare in it.
He took a step or two toward the forest, and paused again, still staring
upward. Where was he going? Where could he go? The question
presented itself with an odd pertinence that drew his set, beardless lips
into a kind of smile. When he had first made his rush outward the one
thing that seemed to him essential was to be free; but now he was
forced to ask himself: For what purpose? Of what use was it to be as
free as wind if he was to be as homeless? It was not merely that he was
homeless for the moment; that was nothing; the overwhelming
reflection was that he, Norrie Ford, could never have a home at all--that
there was scarcely a spot within the borders of civilized mankind where
the law would not hunt him out.
This view of his situation was so apparent and yet so new that it held
him stock-still, gazing into space. He was free--but free only to crawl
back into the jungle and lie down in it, like a wild beast.
"But I'm not a wild beast," he protested, inwardly. "I'm a man--with
human rights. By God, I'll never let them go!"
He wheeled round again, toward the lower lands and the lake. The

lights glowed more brightly as the darkness deepened, each lamp
shining from some little nest, where men and women were busied with
the small tasks and interests that made life. This was liberty! This was
what he had a claim upon! All his instincts were civilized, domestic. He
would not go back to the forest, to herd with wild nature, when he had
a right to lie down among his kind. He had slept in the open hundreds
of times; but it had been from choice. There had been pleasure then, in
waking to the smell of balsam