thing of gaping mouth and strained eyes, he had groped and rushed, torn
between branches, splashed through streams, a menaced animal possessed by
an animal's instinct for flight.

Then a bullet, tearing the leaves above his head, had pulled his
scattered faculties together. He dropped and lay, crawled forward in a
moist darkness, rose and made a slantwise dart across the hill's face,
crouching as a bullet struck into a nearby trunk. Pausing to listen, he
could hear the voices of his pursuers flung back and forth, sound against
sound, broken, clamorous, the baying of the pack. Against the ground,
trickle of water and stir of leaves soft around him, he lay for a second,
the breaths coming in rending gasps from his lungs.

By a series of doublings and loops, he gained the summit and here rose
and looked down. The voices were fainter, the trampling among the
branches was drifting toward the right. The lights of the town showed a
central cluster with a scattering of bright, disconnected particles as if
a fiery thing had fallen and burst, sending sparks in every direction.
Some of them moved, a train of dancing dots, lanterns carried on the
run--the town was roused for the man hunt.

He went on, down from the crest and then up; the voices died and he was
alone in the vast, enmuffling dark.

For the time safe, he allowed himself a rest, flat on his back under a
pine, breathing through open mouth. It was then that he was aware of a
wet warmth on his neck, and feeling of it with clumsy fingers remembered
the shot that had followed the breaking of the door. One inch to the left
and he would have been a dead man. As it was, it was only a surface tear
through the flesh and he sopped at it with his bandanna, muttering and