A Pagan of the Hills

by Charles Neville Buck

She knew that sooner or later her ruse would be discovered by the watchers of the conspiracy, but she asked only two hours of freedom. After that she would be as difficult to find as the rabbit that has gained the heart of the briar patch.

Once lying high up on a sheer and poroused precipice, she had seen a party of horsemen ride by, far below, and she laughed inwardly to herself, guessing at their purpose and object.

She came eventually to the sharp spur where that particular stretch of ridge ended in a precipitous break. That meant that she must for awhile go down to lower and more perilous levels. This was the final, dubious stage of her journey and with it behind her, she would feel that she had won through to security.

Because she was young and strong enough to laugh at fatigue and bold enough to find a certain joy in recklessness, her spirits began to mount. There are huntsmen who will tell you that the wily and experienced fox comes to relish the chase more keenly than the pack which courses him. Alexander went on with a smile in her eyes.

But when she had gone down into the cloistered shadows of the valley her spirits descended too and when she slipped through the thickets and reached a certain point, something like despair tightened about her heart. Across the line of her march boiled a freshet which might as well have been a river. To swim it with her impediments was impossible and though it might carry her dangerously close to the road which she sought to avoid, she had no choice. She must follow it until a crossing developed.

As a woodsman, Alexander acknowledged few peers but this was to her, unfamiliar country. She was moreover pitting her skill against one who was her equal if not her superior, and who knew every trail and by-way hereabouts. He was a youth with a vacuous, almost idiotic face, whom she had that same day encountered. He had left her sight, but had never been too remote to follow or gauge her course and what he learned he relayed to others. In due time he had known without going further just where she must bring up—for he knew the condition of that stream—and its crossings.

The girl came, in due course, upon a broken litter of giant boulders, each the size of a small house, which lay scattered where at last the water grew shallow. She could even make out a point where one might cross dryshod by leaping from rock to rock.

It was in a fashion a place of mystery and foreboding, for each of those titanic rocks, with its age-long smoothness and greenness was a screen whose other side might harbor things only to be guessed. There one must risk an ambuscade, trusting to one's star, and Alexander loosened her pistol and shifted her saddle-bags to her left shoulder and her rifle to her left hand.

Then she started forward—-and one by one left the boulders behind her until she came to the last. As she rounded the final shoulder of sandstone her hand was knocked up and her pistol fell clattering.

Her ambuscaders had known a thing which she had not—that for all the roomy freedom of the woods she must come out at last through this one passage—as wine must come out through the neck of the bottle.