For Teddy mind-action ceased. He was nothing but mad instinct. He knew he must have fired—must have fired twice—that the hand that was to shoot into his temple had betrayed him. He knew, too, that he couldn’t shoot into his temple—that great as was his terror of the handcuffs, his terror of this thing was worse. Flinging the pistol across the floor, his one impulse was to save himself. As he had foreseen, his mind, once it began to work, worked quickly. He saw that the grass growing up to the door of the shack was tall, and hardly beaten down by his footsteps. Lying flat like a lizard, he wriggled his way into it. The very yielding of the swampy bottom beneath his weight was in his favor. By a sense, such as that which had waked him up, he knew that motors were stopping in the road, that people were leaping out, that Flynn and Jackman were the objects of everyone’s concern, and that, in the mystery as to what had happened to them, no one’s attention was as yet directed to himself. He made for the back of the shack, writhing his way round the two corners, and heading out toward the center of the marsh. It was needful to do this, since the shanty and its neighborhood would soon be explored, and he must, if possible, be lost in the swampy tracklessness. Though progress of necessity was slow, he was amazed at the distance he was putting between himself and danger. Oh, if it was only night! If a thundercloud would only come up and darken the sky! But it was the brilliant, pitiless sunshine of an August afternoon, with not a shred of atmosphere to help him. Still he writhed and writhed and writhed his way onward, making the pace of a snake when half of its body is dead. He was no longer Teddy Follett; he was no longer so much as an animal. He was one big agony of mind, which becomes an agony of body; and yet he was eager to live. He began to think that he might live. He seemed as far away from the peril behind him as the woods thing that gives its hunter the slip in the green depths of the covert. Dogs might be able to track him, but not men alone; and while they were bringing up the bloodhounds he might.... And then he heard a shout that struck through him like paralysis. "There he is! I see him!" "Where? Where?" "That line behind the shack—don’t you see?—a little streak right through the grass." "No; I don’t see anything." "Come along and I’ll show you. Come along, boys. We’ll get him. He’s only going on his belly." "Yes, and be croaked, like this poor guy! Don’t forget that the bird over there can give you a dose of lead." So Flynn was dead! That was the meaning of that. Teddy had killed a man. Perhaps he had killed two men. He hadn’t taken time to think of it before; but now that he did, he lay stricken in every muscle of his frame, his face in the mud, and his fingers dug into the queachy roots of the sedges. CHAPTER XX