om time to time he would murmur:

"There's something. What is it? I wonder what it is."

What strange sixth sense stirred in McTeague at this time? What animal
cunning, what brute instinct clamored for recognition and obedience?
What lower faculty was it that roused his suspicion, that drove him out
into the night a score of times between dark and dawn, his head in the
air, his eyes and ears keenly alert?

One night as he stood on the steps of the bunk house, peering into the
shadows of the camp, he uttered an exclamation as of a man suddenly
enlightened. He turned back into the house, drew from under his bed the
blanket roll in which he kept his money hid, and took the canary down
from the wall. He strode to the door and disappeared into the night.
When the sheriff of Placer County and the two deputies from San
Francisco reached the Big Dipper mine, McTeague had been gone two days.

CHAPTER 21

"Well," said one of the deputies, as he backed the horse into the shafts
of the buggy in which the pursuers had driven over from the Hill, "we've
about as good as got him. It isn't hard to follow a man who carries a
bird cage with him wherever he goes."

McTeague crossed the mountains on foot the Friday and Saturday of
that week, going over through Emigrant Gap, following the line of the
Overland railroad. He reached Reno Monday night. By degrees a vague plan
of action outlined itself in the dentist's mind.

"Mexico," he muttered to himself. "Mexico, that's the place. They'll
watch the coast and they'll watch the Eastern trains, but they won't
think of Mexico."

The sense of pursuit which had harassed him during the last week of his
stay at the Big Dipper mine had worn off, and he believed himself to be
very cunning.

"I'm pretty far ahead now, I guess," he said. At Reno he boarded a
south-bound freight on the line of the Carson and Colorado railroad,
paying for a passage in the caboose. "Freights don' run on schedule
time," he muttered, "and a conductor on a passenger train makes it his
business to study faces. I'll stay with this train as far as it goes."

The freight worked slowly southward, through western Nevada, the country
becoming hourly more and more desolate and abandoned. After leaving
Walker Lake the sage-brush country began, and the freight rolled heavily
over tracks that threw off visible layers of heat. At times it stopped
whole half days on sidings or by water tanks, and the engineer and
fireman