anything in the nature of a road or a pathway, in
order to take advantage of the tracklessness which formed his obvious
protection; but now he judged the moment come for putting actual space
between his pursuers and himself. How near, or how far behind him, they
might be he could not guess. If he had covered ground, they would have
covered it too, since they were men born to the mountains, while he had
been bred in towns. His hope lay in the possibility that in this
wilderness he might be lost to their ken, as a mote is lost in the
air--though he built something on the chance that, in sympathy with the
feeling in his favor pervading the simpler population of the region, they
had given negative connivance to his escape. These thoughts, far from
stimulating a false confidence, urged him to greater speed.

And yet, even as he fled, he had a consciousness of abandoning
something--perhaps of deserting something--which brought a strain of
regret into this minute of desperate excitement. Without having had time
to count the cost or reckon the result, he felt he was giving up the
fight. He, or his counsel for him, had contested the ground with all the
resourceful ingenuity known to the American legal practitioner. He was
told that, in spite of the seeming finality of what had happened that
morning, there were still loopholes through which the defence might be
carried on. In the space of a few hours Fate had offered him the choice
between two courses, neither of them fertile in promises of success. The
one was long and tedious, with a possibility of ultimate justification;
the other short and speedy, with the accepted imputation of guilt. He had
chosen the latter--instinctively and on the spur of the moment; and while
he might have repeated at leisure the decision he had made in haste, he
knew even now that he was leaving the ways and means of proving his
innocence behind him. The perception came, not as the result of a process
of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected sensation.

He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than
mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually 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 ou