een shot down yonder at Poplar
Spring des like Ole Marster!"

CHAPTER XV

GAY DISCOVERS HIMSELF

As Gay passed rapidly down the Haunt's Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel
bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and
beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there,
listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps. At
the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the
direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, "Blossom! Are you there,
Blossom?" The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine
parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb
looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes.

"Damn you!" said a voice almost in a whisper. The next instant a shot
rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the
underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its
load into the air. His first confused impression was that he had knocked
against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side. Then, as
a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise,
"I'm shot. By Jove, that's what it means--I'm shot." At the instant,
underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder
that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him. But while the
wonder was still engrossing him--in that same instant, which seemed to
cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in
his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank
down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting. "It's
ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me," he thought, while the
little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud
obscured it.

A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and
lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke
in the cloudless blue. He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating
downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew
that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his
mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping
again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a
leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond,
he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something--at anything--that
would check the swiftness of his desce