N his escape from the sheriff and his deputy, Pete Warren ran with the speed of a deer-hound through the near-by woods. Thinking his pursuers were close behind him, he did not stop even to listen to their footsteps. Through dell and fen, up hill and down, over rocks and through tangled undergrowth he forged his way, his tongue lolling from the corner of his gaping mouth. The thorns and briers had tom gashes in his cheeks, neck, and hands, and left his clothing in strips. The wild glare of a hunted beast was in his eyes. The land was gradually sloping upward. He was getting upon the mountain. For a moment the distraught creature paused, bent his ear to listen and try to decide, rationally, calmly, which was the better plan, to hide in the caverns and craggy recesses of the frowning heights above or speed onward over more level ground. For a moment the drumlike pounding of his heart was all the sound he heard, and then the blast of a hunter's horn broke the stillness, not two hundred yards away, and was thrown back in reverberating echoes from the mountain-side. This was followed by a far-off answering shout, the report of a signal-gun, and then the mellow, terrifying baying of blood-hounds fell upon his ears. Pete stood erect, his knees quivering. No thought of prayer passed through his brain. Prayer, to his mind, was only a series of empty vocal sounds heard chiefly in churches where black men and women stood or knelt in their best clothes, and certainly not for emergencies like this, where granite heavens were closing upon stony earth and he was caught between. Suddenly bending lower, and fresher for the second wind he had got, he sped onward again, choosing the valley rather than the steeper mountain-side. Shouts, gun reports, horn-blasts, and the baying of the hounds now followed him. Presently he came to a clear mountain creek about twenty feet wide and not deeper anywhere than his waist, and in many places barely covering the slimy brown stones over which it flowed. Here, as if by inspiration, came the remembrance of some story he had heard about a pursued negro managing to elude the scent of blood-hounds by taking to water, and into the icy stream Pete plunged, and, slipping, stumbling, falling, he made his way onward.