The prisoner, bound with cords around his ankles and limbs, and with his wrists manacled, was gone!
Every detail was as it had been left, except that at the rear, the only point secure from observation, there were traces of burrowing in the earth. In the cavity thus made between the lowest log and the 'dirt floor' a man's body might with difficulty have been compressed—but a man so shackled! Undoubtedly he had had assistance. This was a rescue.
Only a moment elapsed before the great barn-like doors were widely flaring, and the anxious care of the officers and the eager curiosity of the crowd had explored every nook and cranny within.
The ground was dry, and there was not even a footprint to betoken the movements of the fugitive and his rescuers; only in the freshly upturned earth where he effected escape were the distinct marks of the palms of his hands, significantly close together.
Evidently he was still handcuffed when he had crawled through.
'He's a-wearin' my bracelets yit!' exclaimed the sheriff excitedly. 'Him an' his friends warn't able ter cut them off, like they done the ropes.'
A search was organized in hot haste.
Every cabin, the corn-fields, the woods near at hand, were ransacked. Parties went beating about through the dense undergrowth. They climbed the ledges of great crags. They hovered with keen eyes above dark abysses. They pursued for hours a tortuous course down a deep gorge, strewn with gigantic boulders, washed by the wintry torrents into divers channellings, overhung by cliffs hundreds of feet high, honeycombed with fantastic niches and rifts.
What futile quest! What vastness of mountain wilderness!
The great sun went down in a splendid suffusion of crimson colour, and a translucent golden haze, with a purple garb for the mountains, and a glamourous dream for the sky, and bestowing far and near the gilded license of imagination.