tricate one. First
deathlike silence--the hound had come to the end of the trail. Probably
he was whiffing the trunks of the trees roundabout, looking up eagerly
into them. As if he had been in one of those trees himself, Tom could
see it all, so well did he know the way of a hound.

Still silence. The dog would be circling now. Followed an eager bay as
he struck one of the misleading trails. He thought he was off! Then
silence again, and after a moment the long-drawn howl of a hound,
frankly perplexed, and the fierce, angry yell of a man far behind. With
fingers that trembled because of the chase he had run, Tom reached in
his pocket and got out a cob pipe. This he filled with tobacco, and
fumbling in an upper pocket of his shirt, found some matches.

For ten minutes he sat on that fallen pine, smoking and listening to the
unseen drama in the bottoms over there beyond the hill, his hopes ever
rising, and with these hopes a gratifying sense of achievement and
triumph. Once or twice the dog bayed uncertainly. Once or twice the man
yelled, it seemed to him with lessened confidence. Once it sounded as
if the hound had sat down on his haunches, raised his muzzle on high,
and poured out to heaven his perplexity. Tom had seen them do that. Then
another silence, as if the chase had died out.

Still Tom sat listening. In his exultation he had forgotten for the time
home and Molly and the horrors he had left. Suddenly he rose, and his
face was drawn and white. He turned and began to run, but even as he did
so he knew that it was all over.

Between him and the farthest outskirts of the pattern he had worked out,
had come one long-drawn, triumphant bay after another. The veteran,
wiser by far than any dog Tom had ever known in all his knowledge of
dogs, had worked the puzzle out, had run in ever-greater circles,
keeping his head, knowing that somewhere, cutting the circumference of a
greater circle, he would find the true and straight trail.

And he was coming, coming fast. He could not be more than a mile behind.
He must be at the top of the hill where Tom had enjoyed his brief
triumph, he must be smelling the very log on which Tom had sat. He had
left the log. The sound burst on the old fugitive now, almost like a
chorus, menacing, terrible, inexorable as fate. All the hills, all the
valleys, were echoing as if a whole pack were running. How much worse
than futile had been his tricks! They had only halted the great
bloodhou