The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence watched the proceedings with awe.  Through all these weeks he could never make up his mind to appeal to human compassion.  In the wary primeval savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping “political” had developed an absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity, originating perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain.  These links, he fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind.  It was a repugnant and suggestive load.  Nobody could feel any pity at the disgusting sight of a man escaping with a broken chain.  His imagination became affected by his fetters in a precise, matter-of-fact manner.  It seemed to him impossible that people could resist the temptation of fastening the loose end to a staple in the wall while they went for the nearest police official.  Crouching in holes or hidden in thickets, he had tried to read the faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in the clearings or passing along the paths within a foot or two of his eyes.  His feeling was that no man on earth could be trusted with the temptation of the chain.

One day, however, he chanced to come upon a solitary woman.  It was on an open slope of rough grass outside the forest.  She sat on the bank of a narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket was lying on the ground near her hand.  At a little distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight.  He approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links fluttered from his waist.  A faint clink of his fetters made the woman turn her head.  Too terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted to faint....  Expecting nothing less than to be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with her hands to avoid the sight of the descending axe.  When at last she found courage to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man sitting on the bank six feet away from her.  His thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked legs; the long beard covered the knees on which he rested his chin; all these clasped, folded limbs, the bare shoulders, the wild head with red staring eyes, shook and trembled violently while the bestial creature was making efforts to speak.  It was six weeks since he had heard the sound of his own voice.  It seemed as though he had lost the faculty of speech.  He had become a dumb and despairing brute, till the woman’s sudden, unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of her feminine compassion discovering the complex misery of the man under the terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him to the ranks of humanity.  This point of view is presented in his book, with a very effective eloquence.  She ended, he says, by shedding tears over him, sacred, redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the manner of a converted sinner.  Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait patiently (a police patrol was expected in the Settlement) she went away towards the houses, promising to return at night.