The Eyes of the Woods: A Story of the Ancient WildernessAltsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander)
General
The Eyes of the Woods: A Story of the Ancient Wilderness
Altsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander)
Frontier and pioneer life -- Fiction
He glanced up at the sun and saw that the day would not last more than
two hours longer. There were no clouds and the night was likely to be
bright, furnishing enough light for the warriors to find an ordinary
trail, and willing to delude them now he began to take pains to make his
own trail one that was not ordinary. He resorted to all the usual forest
devices, walking on hard ground, stones and fallen trees, and wading in
water whenever he came to it, methods that he knew would merely delay
the warriors, but that could not baffle them long.
He did not hear the bands signaling again and he surmised that the one
on the south would pass around the southern end of the lake, reuniting
with the other as soon afterward as possible. Nevertheless he curved off
in that direction, and, sinking now to a long walk, he went steadily
ahead, until the great sun went down in a sea of gold behind the forest
and night threw a dusky veil over the wilderness. Then he stopped
entirely, and standing against a huge tree trunk, with which his figure
blended in the night, he took deep breaths.
At first he felt weakness. No one, no matter how powerful and well
trained, could run so long without putting an immense strain upon the
nerves, and for a little space bushes and trees danced before him. Then
the world steadied itself, his heart ceased to beat so hard and the
suffusion of blood retreated from his head. He saw nothing nor heard
anything of his foes, but he knew that the pursuit would not cease. He
felt that this was his great flight, one that might go on for days and
nights, in which every faculty he had would be tested to the utmost, but
he was willing for it to be so. The longer the flight continued the
further he would draw away from the Indian power, and that was what he
wished most of all. He would make such a fugitive as the chiefs had
never known before.
Henry stood a full fifteen minutes beside the brown trunk of the tree,
of which in the dark he seemed to be a part, and so great was his
physical power and elasticity that the time was sufficient to restore
all his strength. When he thought he caught a glimpse of a bush moving
behind him, he resumed the long running walk that covered ground so
rapidly. An hour later he came to a brook, in the bed of which he walked
fully a mile. But he did not expect this to bother his pursuers very
long. They would send warriors up and down either bank until in the
moonlight they struck the trail anew, and then they would follow as
before. But it would give him time, and not doubting that he would find
some new circumstance to aid him, it came sooner than he had expected or
hoped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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