“What ye doin’ ’thout no hat?” demanded the saturnine, perplexed, and vaguely suspicious man.
“Lost it in the ruver. Been fishin’. I hev been visitin’ some folks in the flatwoods ez I be mighty well ’quainted with. I’m goin’ ter git me another hat at the store.”
There was a pause.
“They ’low that thar man war drownded,” said the teamster, discursively.
“Waal,” said Mink, drawlingly, “I ’lowed I’d ax, so ez when I git ter Hazel Valley I mought tell his folks a straight tale.”
The teamster’s wonderment, being satisfied as to the bare head of the young fellow, he was eager to proceed on his journey. Certainly all imaginable suspicions must have been allayed by the pertinacity with which Mink hung upon the wheel, and talked about the rheumatism he feared he had caught a-fishing, and declared he had found no sport in it.
Finally, with apparent reluctance, he took his foot from off the hub, and the teamster was glad to go creaking along on his journey.
Although the danger was so successfully thwarted, the strain upon his ingenuity, his nerves, and his presence of mind had told heavily upon Mink’s reserve force of strength and courage. When at last he reached the deep woods he was more dead than alive, as he flung himself down in the hollow of a poplar-tree, struck long ago by lightning,—its great length fallen, its branches burned, only its gigantic stump standing to boast the proportions this chief of the savage wilds had borne. The young mountaineer doubted, as he fell asleep, if he would ever wake. But exhaustion did not prevail. Over and again, with a nervous start, consciousness would seize upon him, and he would be himself long enough to contrast his forlorn plight with the feignings of his dream, and so sink again into troubled slumber. And yet it was with a deep satisfaction that he gazed out at intervals upon the lonely crowded sylvan limits. The underbrush closed about him; the great trees upreared their heads against the sky, showing only a glimpse of the blue or a flake of the burnished vernal sunshine. How restful the sight, how reassuring the sound of the wind in the leaves! A squirrel frisked by, sleek and dapper, with a brilliant, unaffrighted eye and a long curling tail. The familiar creature seemed like a friend. “Howdy, mister,” observed Mink. “Ye air one citizen ez I ain’t afeard on.”
But the squirrel came no more, although ever and anon Mink lifted himself to look out. He noted the moss, green and gray, on the bark of a rotting log; he started to hear the woodpecker tapping; he listened for a time to a crested red-bird’s song, but its iteration was somnolent in its effects, and when Mink next opened his eyes darkness enveloped the world. He could hardly say whom he might be; he did not know where he was. The oppression of his familiar cell in the Glaston jail filled his consciousness until, as he groped about him, he felt the rotting sides of the old tree and realized that he was free.
“I mus’ be a-travelin’,” he said to himself.