The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wild Olive, by Basil King

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Title: The Wild Olive

Author: Basil King

Release Date: August 18, 2004 [EBook #13212]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: "There are a hundred men beating the mountain to find you"]

The Wild Olive

A Novel

By the author of
The Inner Shrine

Illustrated by
Lucius Hitchcock

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers
All Rights Reserved

Published May, 1910
Printed in the United States of America

Part I

Ford

I

Finding himself in the level wood-road, whose open aisle drew a long,
straight streak across the sky, still luminous with the late-lingering
Adirondack twilight, the tall young fugitive, hatless, coatless, and
barefooted, paused a minute for reflection. As he paused, he listened; but
all distinctiveness of sound was lost in the play of the wind, up hill and
down dale, through chasm and over crag, in those uncounted leagues of
forest. It was only a summer wind, soft and from the south; but its murmur
had the sweep of the eternal breath, while, when it waxed in power, it
rose like the swell of some great cosmic organ. Through the pines and in
the underbrush it whispered and crackled and crashed, with a variety of
effect strangely bewildering to the young man's city-nurtured senses.
There were minutes when he felt that not only the four country constables
whom he had escaped were about to burst upon him, but that weird armies of
gnomes were ready to trample him down.

Out of the confusion of wood-noises, in which his unpractised ear could
distinguish nothing, he waited for a repetition of the shots which a few
hours ago had been the protest of his guards; but, none coming, he sped on
again. He weighed the danger of running in the open against the
opportunities for speed, and decided in favor of the latter. Hitherto, in
accordance with a woodcraft invented to meet the emergency, and entirely
his own, he had avoided