peaked to the sea; this was now his goal. From the place where he slept, the land fell off to the south in a broad valley golden-hazed at the bottom with unleafed willows, then rose again in long elastic jumps to a first crest, tumbled abruptly into a black cañon, and leaped up perpendicularly to a final summit dark with pines and promising of impenetrable recesses.
And behind him, to the north, men were hunting. For three weeks he had been pursued as a wild animal, with growing savagery of purpose, with increase of cunning, by greater numbers. The whole State, aroused, was buzzing about him like a beehive. Hundreds of men, armed as he was, clamoured on his trail. Some had seen him; it was a sudden vision, instantaneous and flitting as the revelation of a photographer’s flashlight—a grinning mask, a savage eye glinting along a rifle-barrel—and then men died, men with fingers upon triggers, before they could pull a trigger. The farmers in the fields worked with rifles in their hands, with pistols, with pitchforks; children armed with shot-guns
