when he rose, staggering like
a drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a
cloud of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and
rotten garments clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but,
maddened and upheld by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the
air, he kept on his course.

Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once, when he stopped and
leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the
distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more
musical interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his
foot trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied
by the interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have
dammed with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the
hillside and trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that
again overflowed and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the
luxurious retreat of many a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of
Lance Harriott. Without a moment's hesitation, without removing a
single garment, he slipped cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing
a single drop. His head disappeared from the level of the bank; the
solitude was again unbroken. Only two objects remained upon the edge of
the ravine,--his revolver and tobacco pouch.

A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue-jay alighted on the bank and
made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way
to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the
pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination.
Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of animated
nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above the bank. It
was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this wholesale
process, washed himself and his light "drill" garments entirely clean,
but that he had, apparently by the same operation, morally cleansed
_himself_, and left every stain and ugly blot of his late misdeeds and
reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here and there, was
rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good-humor and youthful levity.