A hand was extended, and the speaker felt himself seized by the ear, and, glancing up, looked into his father's face. “You come along home with me, son,” said the undertaker. “Your ma 'll have a word to say to you. She's been wanting to lay her hands on you all day.” “See you later, Spide,” Clarence managed to gasp, and then he moved off with a certain jaunty buoyancy, as though he trod on air. CHAPTER XXI WHEN Roger Oakley fled from Antioch on the night of the murder he was resolved that, happen what might, he would not be taken. For half an hour he traversed back alleys and grass-grown “side streets,” seeing no one and unseen, and presently found himself to the north of the town. Then he sat down to rest and consider the situation. He was on the smooth, round top of a hill-side. At his back were woods and fields, while down in the hollow below him, beyond a middle space that was neither town nor country, he saw the lights of Antioch twinkling among the trees. Dannie was there somewhere, wondering why he did not return. Nearer at hand, across a narrow lane, where the rag-weed and jimson and pokeberry flourished rankly, was the cemetery. In the first peaceful month of his stay in Antioch he had walked out there almost every Sunday afternoon to smoke his pipe and meditate. He had liked to hear the blackbirds calling overhead in the dark pines, and he had a more than passing fondness for tombstone literature. Next to the Bible it seemed about the soundest kind of reading. He would seat himself beside a grave whose tenant had been singularly pre-eminent as possessing all the virtues, and, in friendly fellowship with the dead, watch the shadows marshalled by the distant woodlands grow from short to long, or listen to the noisy cawing of the crows off in the cornfields. The night was profoundly still, until suddenly the town bell rang the alarm. The old convict's face blanched at the sound, and he came slowly to his feet. The bell rang on. The lights among the trees grew in number, dogs barked, there was the murmur of voices. He clapped his hands to his ears and plunged into the woods. He had no clear idea of where he was going, but all night long he plodded steadily forward, his one thought to be as far from Antioch as possible by morning. When at last morning came, with its song of half-awakened birds and its level streaks of light piercing the gray dawn, he remembered that he was hungry, and that he had eaten nothing since noon the day before. He stopped at the first farmhouse he came to for breakfast, and at his request the farmer's wife put up a lunch for him to carry away. It was night again when he reached Barrow's Saw Mills. He ventured boldly into the one general store and made a number of purchases. The storekeeper was frankly curious to learn what he was doing and where he was going, but the old convict met his questions with surly reserve.