“Or a man stunted in his growth,” he thought for the first time.
And the thought remained with him. One could conceive of a man who had never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well, a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild things.
“Who slipped up behind a man and drove a knife into his back! Who even made way with the clothing, everything, leaving the bones to whiten through summer and winter as other animals of prey left the creatures they had killed!”
Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself, resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night, the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon. He shook it off with an impatient imprecation. But all day it hovered about him. Again he was glad of his horse’s companionship.
Not a nervous man, still he was not without imagination. He began to be oppressed with the stillness of the wilderness. As he pushed on downstream, watchful for other tracks, he came into a valley which widened until it was perhaps a mile across, carpeted with grass, timbered with the biggest trees he had seen since leaving Belle Fortune, their boles five and six and seven feet through, every one a monument of majesty, planted centuries before some long-forgotten ancestor of John Sheldon learned of a land named America.
There were wide, open spaces. One looking through the giant trunks seemed always looking down the long, dimly lit aisle of the chief temple of the gods of the world. Power, and venerable age—and silence! A silence so eternal that it seemed veritably tangible and indomitable.
A man wanted at once to call out, to shatter the heavy stillness which bore upon his soul, and felt his lips grown mute. The creek gurgled, here and there a cone fell or there was the twitter of a bird; these sounds passed through the silence, accentuated it, were a part of it, a foil to it, but in no way disturbed the ancient reign of silence.
Through this world, which might have come at dawn from the hand of its Maker, Sheldon pushed on swiftly, his brain alive with a hundred questions and fancies. Where there was loose, soft dirt, where there was a likely crossing, he looked for tracks. And as hour after hour passed he found nothing to indicate that he was not, as he had imagined until this morning, alone in this part of the Sasnokee-keewan.
And yet he thought that last night’s visitor was ahead of him. True, a half-demented, supercunning wild man might have hidden behind any of those big tree-trunks, might even now be watching him with feverishly bright eyes. Sheldon must chance that; he could not seek behind every tree in this forest of countless thousands. But he could feel pretty well assured that the creature he sought had not fled to east or to west any considerable distance. For on either hand, seen here and there through the trees, the sides of the cañon rose to steep cliffs where a man would have to toil for hours to make his way half-way up.
Noon came. Again Sheldon was in a swiftly narrowing gorge. No longer was the world silent about him. The roar and thunder of water shouting and echoing through the rocky defile nearly deafened him. Suddenly his path seemed shut off in front. It was impossible to get a horse over the ridge here on either hand; impossible to ford the torrent where many a treacherous hole hid under boiling water. He lunched and rested here, wondering if he must turn back.