It was a time of agony. Should he try to creep back to his gun, or should he make a sudden dash? He started to try the latter, and had a pang of despair as the deer whirled and bolted away. He leaped to the camp and grabbed his gun and sprang out into sight again--and there, off to the right, was another deer. It was a huge buck, with wide-spreading antlers, rising out of the bushes where it stood. It saw Thyrsis, and started away; and in a flash he raised his gun and fired. He saw the deer stumble, and he fired the other barrel; and then he started in wild pursuit. He had been warned to beware of a wounded deer; but he forgot that--he forgot also that he had no more shells upon him. He ran madly through the forest, springing over fallen logs, plunging through thickets--he would have seized hold of the animal with his bare hands, if only he could have caught up with it. The deer was badly hurt. It would leap ahead, and then stumble, half falling, and then leap again. Even in this way, the distance it covered was amazing; Thyrsis was appalled at the power of the creature, its tremendous bounds, the shock of its fall, and the crashing of the underbrush before it. It seemed like a huge boulder, leaping down a precipice; and Thyrsis stood at a safe distance and watched it. According to the poetry-books he should have been ashamed--perhaps moved to tears by the reproachful look in the great creature’s eyes. But assuredly the makers of the poetry-books had never needed the price of a railroad-ticket as badly as Thyrsis did! He only realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city--while back at his “open-camp” a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music of it went, it was not fast enough for his imagination. It seemed as if the rails were speaking--saying to him, over and over and over again, “Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis!” BOOK X THE END OF THE TETHER _They sat still watching upon the hill-top, drinking in the scent of the clover. “Ah, if only we might have come back here!” she sighed. “If only tee had never had to leave!” “That way lies unhappiness” he said. “Perhaps,” she answered; and then quoted-- ‘Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp’d hill! Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?” “I wonder,” said he, “if the poet put as much into these stanzas as we find in them!”_