But no! only her own desperate courage would now avail, and realizing that this look upon Tim's Place was the last one, she turned and fled down the path. Sixty miles of stony, bush-encumbered, brier-grown, seldom-travelled road lay ahead of her! Sixty miles of mingled swamp, morass, and rock-ribbed hill! Sixty miles through the sombre silence and persistent menace of a wilderness, peopled only by death-intending creatures, yellow-eyed and sharp-fanged! With only a sickening, soul-nauseating fate awaiting her at Tim's Place, and her sole escape this almost insane flight, she sped on. The faint, spectral rifts of moonlight through interlaced fir and spruce as often deceived as aided her; bending boughs whipped her, bushes and logs tripped her, sharp stones and pointed sticks bit her; she hurried over hillocks, wallowed through sloughs and dashed into tangles of briers, heedless of all except her one mad impulse to escape. Soon the ever present menace of a wilderness assailed her,--the yowl of a wildcat close at hand; in a swamp, the sharp bark of a wolf; on a hillside above her, the hoot of an owl; and when after two hours of this desperate flight had exhausted her and she was forced to halt, strange creeping, crawling things seemed all about. And now the erratic, fantastic belief of Old Tomah returned to her. With him the forest was peopled by a weird, uncanny race, sometimes visible and sometimes not--"spites," he called them, and they were the souls of both man and beast; sometimes good, sometimes evil, according as they had been in life, and all good or ill luck was due to their ghostly influences. They followed the hunter and trapper day and night, luring him into safety or danger, as they chose. They were everywhere, and in countless numbers, ready and sure to avenge all wrongs and reward all virtues. They had a Chieftain also, a great white spectre who came forth from the north in winter, and swept across the wilderness, spreading death and terror. Many times at Tim's Place, Chip had sat enthralled on winter evenings, while Old Tomah described these mystic genii. They were so real to him that he made them real to her, and now, alone in this vast wilderness, spectral in the faint moonlight and filled with countless terrors, they returned in full force. On every side she could see them, creeping, crawling, through the undergrowth or along the interlaced boughs above her. She could hear the faint hiss of their breath in the night wind, see the gleam of their little eyes in dark places--they were crossing the path in front of her, following close behind, and gathering about her from every direction.