Without quite knowing why he did so, he crept down the slope, feeling his way among the stumps, and stooping low, lest his white shirt, wet and clinging limply to his body, might betray him to some keen-eyed marksman.  Presently one of the old root-hedges, common to the countryside, barred his path—­a queer, twisted line of long, gray tentacles that had once sucked sustenance from the soil, but now reached up idly into a barren element, where the wild grape was covering their grotesque nakedness with masses of kindly beauty.  Below him he saw lights shining clearly like the planets, or faintly like the mere star-dust of the sky, while between the two degrees of brightness he knew there must lie the bosom of the lake.  He had come to the little fringe of towns that clings to the borders of Champlain, here with the Adirondacks behind him, and there with the mountains of Vermont, but keeping close to the great, safe waterway, as though distrusting the ruggedness of both.

It was a moment at which to renew his alarm in this proximity to human dwellings.  Like the tiger that has ventured beyond the edge of the jungle, he must slink back at the sight of fire.  He turned himself slowly, looking up the heights from which he had come down, as they rolled behind him, mysterious and hostile, in the growing darkness.  Even the sky, from which it seemed impossible for the daylight ever to depart, now had an angry red glare in it.

He took a step or two toward the forest, and paused again, still staring upward.  Where was he going?  Where could he go?  The question presented itself with an odd pertinence that drew his set, beardless lips into a kind of smile.  When he had first made his rush outward the one thing that seemed to him essential was to be free; but now he was forced to ask himself:  For what purpose?  Of what use was it to be as free as wind if he was to be as homeless?  It was not merely that he was homeless for the moment; that was nothing; the overwhelming reflection was that he, Norrie Ford, could never have a home at all—­that there was scarcely a spot within the borders of civilized mankind where the law would not hunt him out.

This view of his situation was so apparent and yet so new that it held him stock-still, gazing into space.  He was free—­but free only to crawl back into the jungle and lie down in it, like a wild beast.

“But I’m not a wild beast,” he protested, inwardly.  “I’m a man—­with human rights.  By God, I’ll never let them go!”

He wheeled round again, toward the lower lands and the lake.  The lights glowed more brightly as the darkness deepened, each lamp shining from some little nest, where men and women were busied with the small tasks and interests that made life.  This was liberty!  This was what he had a claim upon!  All his instincts were civilized, domestic.  He would not go back to the forest, to herd with wild nature, when he had a right to lie down among his