"It's the alarm," he said. "A prisoner must have escaped."
Amid excited exclamations the train started again, and the conductor withdrew his head. "They'll soon get him," he predicted, as he punched Harry's ticket. "The poor devil won't get far in those striped clothes they make them wear!"
"No," said Harry. "I fancy he won't."
Night had fallen, the dark relieved by the dim lustre of a thin new moon, when Sevier rose and sauntered back to the platform. The train was passing through a defile and laboriously puffing up a grade. He looked back into the lighted car; no one was observing him. He buttoned his coat close about him and poising on the lowest step to choose his ground, sprang off into a snowbank.
He had made his leap with all the care possible, but the speed of the train was such that only the snow and his padded clothing saved him from serious injury. As it was it was some minutes before he could regain his breath, and then it came with a keen stab that seemed a sword piercing his shoulder—a sharp complaint from the recent wound. He rose painfully, but at the first step collapsed with a groan, realising that he had twisted his ankle badly. With lips compressed from the wretched pang, he rose again and set the injured member to the ground, forcing it to bear his weight. For a while each step was agony, then this dulled somewhat and he went steadily on, limping along the uneven ties.
When he came to the crest of the rise he stopped and looked about him. He knew, roughly, where he was. Across the dark valley unrolling at his feet under a sky that shook with stars, he could dimly make out another darker ridge. Beyond lay a deeper valley and beyond that the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, and there, forty miles away as the crow flies—how far by the irregular route he must take he could not estimate—lay his mountain lodge, the lonely little demesne of forest and stream, whither he had been wont to go for summer weeks of hunting and fishing, with its rough but spacious bungalow presided over by his care-taker, old "Jubilee Jim," whose father had been a slave of his father before the Civil War.
Forty miles as the crow flies! Across a difficult and sparsely-settled country, with now only the faint moonlight and a natural instinct of direction to guide him, in patent-leather shoes and with a sprained ankle!
He set his teeth and plunged down the declivity through the tumbled rocks and snow-drifts.