He was not a native of the mountains.  Though in the two years spent among them he had come to acknowledge their charm, it was only as a man learns to love an alien mistress, whose alternating moods of savagery and softness hold him with a spell of which he is half afraid.  More than any one suspected or he could have explained, his reckless life had been the rebellion of his man-trained, urban instinct against the domination of this supreme earth-force, to which he was of no more value than a falling leaf or a dissolving cloud.  Even now, as he flung himself on the forest’s protection, it was not with the solace of the son returning to the mother; it was rather as a man might take refuge from a lion in a mammoth cavern, where the darkness only conceals dangers.

After the struggle with crude nature the smooth, grass-carpeted wagon-track brought him more than a physical sense of comfort.  It not only made his flight swift and easy, but it had been marked out by man, for man’s purposes and to meet man’s need.  It was the result of a human intelligence; it led to a human goal.  It was possible that it might lead even him into touch with human sympathies With the thought, he became conscious all at once that he was famished and fatigued.  Up to the present he had been as little aware of a body as a spirit on its way between two worlds.  It had ached and sweated and bled; but he had not noticed it.  The electric fluid could not have seemed more tireless or iron more insensate.  But now, when the hardship was somewhat relaxed, he was forced back on the perception that he was faint and hungry His speed slackened; his shoulders sagged; the long second wind, which had lasted so well, began to shorten.  For the first time it occurred to him to wonder how long his strength would hold out.

It was then that he noticed a deflection of the wood-road toward the north, and down over the brow of the plateau on which for a mile or two its evenness had been sustained.  It was a new sign that it was tending toward some habitation.  Half an hour ago he would have taken this to mean that he must dash into the forest again; but half an hour ago he had not been hungry.  He did not say to himself that he would venture to any man’s door and ask for bread.  So far as he knew, he would never venture to any man’s door again; nevertheless, he kept on, down-hill, and down-hill nearer and nearer the lake, and farther and farther from the mountain and the lairs of safety.

Suddenly, at a turning, when he was not expecting it, the wood-road emerged into a rough clearing.  Once more he stopped to reflect and take his bearings.  It had grown so dark that there was little danger in doing so; though, as he peered into the gloom, his nerves were still taut with the expectation of shot or capture from behind.  Straining his eyes, he made out a few acres that had been cleared for their timber, after which Nature had been allowed to take her own way again, in unruly growths of saplings, tangles of wild vines, and clumps of magenta fireweed.