Grant’s hand slipped unobtrusively under his coat and his eyes narrowed as his heart tightened and became resolved.
Spurrier had not yet seen him but at any moment he might do so. There was nothing to prevent the wandering and casual glance from alighting on the spot where the deserter stood, and when it did so the mountaineer would draw and fire.
But as the ex-officer’s eyes went absently here and 52 there a girl passed at his back and perhaps she spoke as she passed. At all events the officer straightened and stiffened. Across his face flashed swiftly such an expression as might have come from a sudden and stinging blow, and then, losing all interest in the bustle of the lower decks, the man turned on his heel and walked rapidly away.
The deserter’s hand stole away from the pistol grip and his breath ran out in a long, sibilant gasp of relief and reaction. When later he had landed safely and unmolested, he turned in flight toward the mountains that he knew over there across the continent—mountains where only bloodhounds could run him to earth.
Beyond the rims of those forest-tangled peaks he had never looked out until he had joined the army, and once back in them, though he dare not go, for a while, to his own home county, he could shake off his palsy of fear.
He traveled as a hobo, moneyless, ignorant, and unprepossessing of appearance, yet before the leaves began to fall he was at last tramping slopes where the air tasted sweeter to his nostrils, and the speech of mankind fell on his ear with the music of the accustomed.
The name of Bud Grant no longer went with him. That, since it carried certain unfulfilled duties to an oath of allegiance, he generously ceded to the United States Army, and contented himself with the random substitute of Sim Colby.
Now he tramped swingingly along a bowlder-broken creek bed which by local euphemism was called a road. When his way led him over the backbone of 53 a ridge he could see, almost merged with the blue of the horizon, the smoky purple of a sugar loaf peak, which marked his objective.
When he passed that he would be in territory where his journeying might end. To reach it he must transverse the present vicinity in which a collateral branch of his large family still dwelt, and where he himself preferred to walk softly, wary of possible recognition.
To the man whose terror had seen in every casual eye that rested on him while he crossed a continent, a gleam of accusation, it was as though he had reached sanctuary. The shoulders that he had forced into a hang-dog slough to disguise the soldierly bearing which had become habitual in uniform, came back into a more buoyant and upright swing. The face that had been sullen with fear now looked out with something of the bravado of earlier days, and the whole experience of the immediate past; of months and even years, took on the unreality of a nightmare from which he was waking.