neither of them fertile in promises of success.  The one was long and tedious, with a possibility of ultimate justification; the other short and speedy, with the accepted imputation of guilt.  He had chosen the latter—­instinctively and on the spur of the moment; and while he might have repeated at leisure the decision he had made in haste, he knew even now that he was leaving the ways and means of proving his innocence behind him.  The perception came, not as the result of a process of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected sensation.

He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually gathers strength, as it rolls inland, to toss up the crests of the Adirondacks.  Here, burying himself in the woods, he skirted the unkempt farms, whose cottage lights, just beginning to burn, served him as signals to keep farther off.  When forced to cross one of the sterile fields, he crawled low, blotting himself out among the bowlders.  At times a patch of tall, tasselled Indian corn, interlaced with wandering pumpkin vines, gave him cover, till he regained the shelter of the vast Appalachian mother-forest which, after climbing Cumberlands, Alleghanies, Catskills, and Adirondacks, here clambers down, in long reaches of ash and maple, juniper and pine, toward the lowlands of the north.

As far as he had yet been able to formulate a plan of flight, it was to seek his safety among the hills.  The necessity of the instant was driving him toward the open country and the lake, but he hoped to double soon upon his tracks, finding his way back to the lumber camps, whose friendly spiriting from bunk-house to bunk-house would baffle pursuit.  Once he had gained even a few hours’ security, he would be able to some extent to pick and choose his way.

He steered himself by the peak of Graytop, black against the last coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star.  There was further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a circle, when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward and saw the pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot straight behind him.  There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied instinct to return that the driven stag must feel toward the bed of fern from which he has been roused.  But, for the minute, there was one imperative necessity—­to go on—­to go on anywhere, anyhow, so long as it took him far enough from the spot where masked men had loosed the handcuffs from his wrists and stray shots had come ringing after him.  In his path there were lakelets, which he swam, and streams, which he forded.  Over the low hills he scrambled through an undergrowth so dense that even the snake or the squirrel might have avoided it, to find some easier way.  Now and then, as he dragged himself up the more barren ascents, the loose soil gave way beneath his steps in miniature avalanches of stone and sand, over which he crept, clinging to tufts of grass or lightly rooted saplings, to rise at last with hands scratched and feet bleeding.  Then, on again!—­frantically, as the hare runs and as the crow flies, without swerving—­on, with the sole aim of gaining time and covering distance!