Stooping slowly, with a wild terror shuddering through his veins, he looked at the wounded limb. But no, there was no bite. The snake had missed him. In his backward leap, he had struck his leg against the upturned spike of a broken branch which lay behind him. The revulsion in his spirit at this discovery was so great that he broke into a quaver of hysterical laughter, which echoed dismally through the swamp, and woke such an answering chorus of demoniacal hooting and screeching in the adjacent boughs, that he was affrighted, and turning away from the open space, he was about to rush into the forest on his flank, when he saw with a leap of heart, two round glistening balls in the dark foliage of a tree a few yards before him, and something long and dark crouching along the bough. It was a panther! He wheeled at once with a bound, and fled headlong into the red morass. Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged along through the inky water, quivering at every step lest he should feel the sting of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe of the alligator. It was a long journey across the open fen. The red light had faded from sky and water, and the full moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens when he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous orb of silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached the solid sable gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness. An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey across the open fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange man, with a single dog, had followed him, at a considerable distance the whole way. A strange man, silent, with a silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without coming, or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that this was so, though he did not dare to turn his head to see if it was so. He knew too just how the man looked—a dark figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also dark, by his side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!