ay be blind, but all the pictures of blind cupids in the
world can not make Love blind. And it was well that Ralph weighed things
in this way. For the time was come in which he needed all the courage
the blue billet could give him.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FLIGHT.

About ten days after Ralph's return to Flat Creek things came to a
crisis.

The master was rather relieved at first to have the crisis come. He had
been holding juvenile Flat Creek under his feet by sheer force of will.
And such an exercise of "psychic power" is very exhausting. In racing on
the Ohio the engineer sometimes sends the largest of the firemen to hold
the safety valve down, and this he does by hanging himself to the lever
by his hands. Ralph felt that he had been holding the safety-valve down,
and that he was so weary of the operation that an explosion would be a
real relief. He was a little tired of having everybody look on him as a
thief. It was a little irksome to know that new bolts were put on the
doors of the houses in which he had staid. And now that Shocky was gone,
and Bud had turned against him, and Aunt Matilda suspected him, and even
poor, weak, exquisite Walter Johnson would not associate with him, he
felt himself an outlaw indeed. He would have gone away to Texas or the
new gold fields in California had It not been for one thing. That
letter on blue foolscap paper kept a little warmth in his heart.

His course from school on the evening that something happened lay
through the sugar-camp. Among the dark trunks of the maples, solemn and
lofty pillars, he debated the case. To stay, or to flee? The worn nerves
could not keep their present tension much longer.

It was just by the brook, or, as they say in Indiana, the "branch[26],"
that something happened which brought him to a sudden decision. Ralph
never afterward could forget that brook. It was a swift-running little
stream, that did not babble blatantly over the stones. It ran through a
thicket of willows, through the sugar-camp, and out into Means's
pasture. Ralph had just passed through the thicket, had just crossed the
brook on the half-decayed log that spanned it, when, as he emerged from
the water-willows on the other side, he started with a sudden shock. For
there was Hannah, with a white, white face, holding out a little note
folded like an old-fashioned thumb-paper.

"Go quick!" she stammered as she slipped it Into Ralph's hand,
inadvertently touching his fingers