“No, not this morning, Squire Braile,”
Redfield lingered a moment, and then he said, askingly,
“I didn’t see old Mr. Gillespie anywhere
this morning.”
“I didn’t notice. Where it comes
to a division in public, he doesn’t usually
take sides against his daughter.”
“He won’t have to, after this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you know she told him once that
if he would bring her a hair of Dylks’s head
she would deny him? I helped him to a whole lock
of it.”
“Oh, you did that?” There was condemnation
in the Squire’s tone, and as if he had been
going to express a more explicit displeasure, he hesitated.
Then he said, “Well, I must be going in,”
and turned his back upon Redfield, who turned again
into the turnpike road and took his way homeward past
the long and deep stretch of woods where Dylks had
found refuge.
In the middle of the forest there was a dense thicket
of lower growths on a piece of dry land lifted above
the waters of a swamp. The place was the lair
of such small wild things as still survived in the
wilderness once the haunt of the wolf and the wild
cat, and the resort of the bear allured by the profusion
of the huckleberries which grew there. But, except
in the early fall when the annual squirrel-hunt swept
over the whole country side and the summer drought
had made the swamp easily passable to the gunners,
the place was unmolested. Even the country boy
who seeks the bounty of nature wherever she offers
it, and makes the outlying property of man his prey
where nature has been dispossessed, did not penetrate
the thicket in his search for hazelnuts or chinquapins;
it was proofed against his venture by its repute of
rattlesnakes and copperheads and the rumor of ghosts
and witches. Few, of men or boys, knew the approach
to the interior by the narrow ridge of dry land lifted
above the marsh, and Dylks did not stop in his flight
till he reached the thicket and saw in it his hope
of securer refuge. He walked round it through
the pools which the frog and turtle haunted, twice
before he found this path, overhung by a tangle of
grapevines. There his foot by the instinct which
the foot has where the eye fails of a path, divined
the scarcely trodden way, and he found himself in
a central opening among the thickly growing bushes.
It was warm there, without the close heat of the woodland,
and dry except for the spring of clear water that
bubbled up in the heart of it, and trickled out over
green mosses into the outer waters of the swamp.
The man stooped over and drank his fill, and then
made his greedy breakfast on the berries that grew
abundantly round, and nodded hospitably to his hand.
All the time he wept, and moaned to himself in the
self-pity of a hunted, fearful wretch. Then he
drank again from the spring, and without rising from
his knees pushed himself back a little from it, and
fell over in an instant sleep.
