Slower and slower grew my pace. My heart seemed to swell and shut out the very breath of life.
On, ever onward, I toiled with a desperate effort to escape my pursuers, whose rumbling voices it half seemed to me were faintly booming in the distance.
But Nature would do no more!
I reeled, I staggered, I stopped, I fell!
How long I lay there I know not. But when I came to myself, I could plainly feel that change in the air which tells of the coming day. The rippling of a brook fell on my ear. I dragged my aching body in the direction the sound came from. A deep pull at the cool, clear water of the brook refreshed me somewhat. I attempted to rise; but, O, new loss of hope—to discover that my joints had stiffened while sleeping on the ground, uncovered, yes, even ill-clad, for I had left one piece of my clothing hanging on the window-sill of my lodge in the village, to quiet any suspicion which might arise in the minds of the serving-men.
Thoughts of home, however, of the elder baron, of the gentle baroness, my mother, of my loved Bulger, flitted through my fevered brain, and prompted me to make one more effort to regain my feet and escape death at the hands of chief Ztwish-Ztwish’s enraged people, who would soon be bounding along, up hill and down dale, like spirits of the wind, as they were.
A groan escaped my lips as I rose to my feet, so like knife-points in my joints were the pains which shot through my frame.
But I must try to be up and away, even though the effort cost me a thousand agonizing twinges.
I owe it to the loved ones at home to push on till I fall utterly broken, till, like a stricken beast, robbed of the power to stand, I should topple and fall at the feet and at the mercy of my pursuers.
Such were the thoughts which oppressed my poor, reeling brain.