As she spoke, she resumed her flight, running till she panted, and then walking rapidly on with desperate, but alas! purposeless energy. For the further she advanced, the more remote became the Forks, as she saw by the position of the sun; yet she dared not turn back, as that would be to run into the jaws of her hunters. The first cross-path that she met, and which led in the right direction, she entered, however. But after following this for awhile, it also went astray, and now she was in greater perplexity and dismay than ever.
In fact she was evidently advancing into one of those almost pathless swamps, which abounded in that region, and which had engulphed many a lost traveller as effectually as the sea swallows up a foundered crew. The soil beneath her was no longer solid, though sandy; but was a soft, black vegetable mould, in which she often sank to the ankles. The path, for it was now scarcely a road, was almost overgrown with bushes; and occasionally it was really difficult to tell where it was, the wheel-tracks, if they had ever existed, having long ago been obliterated.
Yet she struggled on. Despair gave her now the energy which hope had formerly supplied; and though almost exhausted with physical weakness, her brave soul still upheld her flagging frame, and still urged her forward. Thus she staggered on, all that morning, dragging her heavy limbs along, and continually rallying herself to a swifter pace, when she mistook the wind among the trees for the hurrying tread of pursuers, or the distant bay of a hound.
The sun was now high in the heavens. Kate had been on her feet since two hours before the dawn. She could no longer advance at a faster pace than a walk, and that a slow and painful one. She saw also that she was moving almost in a circle, the sun being now before her, now on her right, now behind her, and now to the left. But, though hopelessly lost in the swamp, though sometimes almost miring in the oozy soil, she did not, for one moment, entertain the thought of turning back.
“Oh! no, no,” she said wildly, “certain death, death in any shape, is better than falling again into those merciless hands.”
Even the idea of lingering for days, in a state of starvation, was less terrible to her than being retaken. She had heard of persons, lost in swamps, who had perished miserably for the want of food, and whose bleached skeletons, found long years after, had been the only clue their friends ever had to their fate; and she had formerly shuddered at such tales. But she did not shudder now. She felt that, if she could purchase immunity from the outlaws in no other way, she would gladly accept even this horrible alternative.
“God,” she said, “tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. He will give me strength to face such a death.”
Noon was now at hand. The path had long since dwindled into a mere blind track, formed rather by the natural space between the trees than by the footsteps of man or beast. Frequently tall bushes, interlaced into an impenetrable net-work, guarded the sides like a hedge; and again the path swelled into natural openings, half an acre or so in extent. Lofty trees, whose sombre verdure threw an almost funereal gloom around, towered high into the sky, with here and there a blasted pine, shooting, arrowy-like, high over all, and adding to the desolate aspect of the landscape.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE BLOODHOUND
But I, in none of these,
Find place or refuge. —Milton.