But the squirrel came no more, although ever and anon Mink lifted himself to look out. He noted the moss, green and gray, on the bark of a rotting log; he started to hear the woodpecker tapping; he listened for a time to a crested red-bird’s song, but its iteration was somnolent in its effects, and when Mink next opened his eyes darkness enveloped the world. He could hardly say whom he might be; he did not know where he was. The oppression of his familiar cell in the Glaston jail filled his consciousness until, as he groped about him, he felt the rotting sides of the old tree and realized that he was free. “I mus’ be a-travelin’,” he said to himself. Free, but with so burning a pain in every limb that he could hardly stand upon his feet; and what was this new misfortune? His forlorn boots were bursting into fragments. As he staggered into the moonshine he sat down, and putting one foot on his knee examined the sole in rueful contemplation. “Now don’t that thar beat kingdom come! Them boots war mighty nigh new when I went ter jail, an’ I never stood on ’em none thar sca’cely. Mus’ hev been the soakin’ they got. I ain’t useter goin’ bar’foot lately, an’ how’ll I travel thirty mile this-a-way?” It was at a slow gait that he hobbled along; now and then he stumbled, and would have fallen but for his hasty clutch at a bush or a tree. His feet were pierced by flints through the crevices of his boots, and he was presently aware that he was marking his steps with his blood. He made scant progress, although he struggled strenuously, and it was long before day when he was fain to lie down in a rift in a great bank of rocks, and recruit his wasted energies with sleep. “I hope I ain’t a-goin’ ter die in sech a hole ez this,” he said, “ez ef I war a sure-enough mink. But Laws-a-massy, what be I, ef I ain’t a mink?” He laughed sarcastically as he turned himself over. He had evolved some harsh theories of worldly inequalities. If he had knocked Jerry Price or Ben Doaks senseless with a bit of iron, he argued, he would have hardly been in jeopardy of arrest; the affair would perchance have been chronicled by the gossips as “a right smart fight.” But he must forfeit twenty years of his life for assaulting a man of Gwinnan’s quality. And he had some bitter reflections to divert his mind, with the functions of a counter-irritant, from his aching bones, his bleeding feet, his overpowering sense of fatigue.