lse and short on stickability, drifted back to more comfortable
quarters during the day, contending that if Hap were captured, the
officers would claim the reward anyhow--so what was the use bucking
the System?

The snowfall stopped in the early morning. Sunrise disclosed the
world trimmed from horizon to horizon in fairy fluff. Householders
jocosely shoveled their walks; small children resurrected attic sleds;
here and there a farmer appeared on Main Street during the forenoon
in a pung-sleigh or cutter with jingling bells. The sun soared higher,
and the day grew warmer. Eaves began dripping during the noon hour,
to stop when the sun sank about four o'clock behind Bancroft's hill.

After the sunset came a perfect evening. The starlight was magic.
Many people called in at the newspaper-office, after the movies, to
learn if the man hunt had brought results.

Between ten and eleven o'clock the lights on the valley floor
blinked out; the town had gone to bed--that is, the lights blinked
out in all homes excepting those on the eastern outskirts, where
nervous people worried over the possibilities of a hungry, hunted
convict's burglarizing their premises, or drawn-faced mothers lived
mentally through a score of calamities befalling red-blooded sons
who had now been absent twenty-four hours.

Sometime between nine o'clock and midnight--she had no way of
telling accurately--Cora McBride stumbled into the Lyons clearing.
No one would have recognized in the staggering, bedraggled
apparition that emerged from the silhouette of the timber the figure
that had started so confidently from the Harrison tract the previous
evening.

For over an hour she had hobbled blindly. It was wholly by accident
that she had stumbled into the clearing. And the capture of Ruggam
had diminished in importance. Warm food, water that would not tear
her raw throat, a place to lie and recoup her strength after the
chilling winter night--these were the only things that counted now.
Though she knew it not, in her eyes burned the faint light of fever.
When a snag caught her snowshoe and tripped her, there was hysteria
in her cry of resentment.

As she moved across from the timber-line her hair was revealed
fallen down; she had lost a glove, and one hand and wrist were
cruelly red where she had plunged them several times into the snow
to save herself from falling upon her face. She made but a few yards
before the icy thong of her right snowshoe snapped