So Fagan and Patricia must needs leave the snug little house at the end of the sleepy, grass-grown street, and go out on the High Trail, the unknown of the people of the plains, a broad highway to things with hoofs and claws and wings, and to men little less wild than they, the men of the hills. At times the brown thread of the Trail was twined amid the giant roots of trees, and they wandered in a cool twilight, alone with the long creepers and the ferns and the bright birds which played about some opening in the matted roof, far above their heads, where the sun dropped through for a brief hour. Sometimes it clung to the massive walls of a cañon, where a river boiled so far below that the sound of its torment came to their ears like the babble of a brook. Sometimes it shot upward to the realm of the clouds, and from the bare, grassy heights they peered out through shifting mist wreaths over all the cities and fields of the plains to the blue hint of the distant sea.
Fagan and Patricia followed the Trail steadily but leisurely, day after day. There was no call for haste, no white pursuer knew that road. So they laughed and played, and lay for hours beside some cool spring, basking in the warm sunshine and the thin, sharp air, and camped at night in little valleys under a pall of cloud. Once Fagan shot a deer, and they delayed for days, drying the meat over pungent wood-smoke. But as their muscles hardened to the Trail, they insensibly made greater progress, in spite of their dallying.
Two weeks brought them to the land of the Unknown, had they but known it. The mountains were higher and wilder, the cloud-caps more frequent. Often the forest on some huge hill, towering black above the Trail, was thin and pointed at the top, as if it had been torn, and there, unseen of them, was a village perched high on the trunks of trees, whence keen-eyed men watched their progress. But they were children of the plains and could not know, so they walked undismayed. And the keen-eyed men walked with them, unseen, frisking along above them over ground where others would have crept—short, huge-limbed men, whose stiff black hair flowed over their shoulders, and was tied out of their eyes with fillets, men who squatted naked in the mists of evening and did not shiver, men who brought their sweethearts hideous dowries of human heads. They hung about the Trail, watching these strange creatures who walked openly and undismayed in the land of Fear. Often, when the camp-fire was lighted, they stole up with their muscles twitching like a cat's before she springs, and then halted as a great voice rang over the forest—"I'se been wo'okin' on the ra'alroad"—and they clawed their way up the slopes to the long-legged villages, and took counsel together in the queer fire-shadows.
One evening as they camped, Patricia missed a little bundle of venison and strolled back along the Trail to look for it. Fagan kindled the fire and then strolled back, too. "Hoy, Patsí," he called. The forest was silent. He turned a bend in the Trail, and there—Fagan gazed at it stupidly. Then the blind impulse of wrath swept over him again. But there was naught to strike. The long shadows of the trees lay across the Trail, the creepers swayed lazily in the evening breeze; far up, a crow called petulantly to her belated mate. Fagan swung his arm helplessly at the forest.
"Come out," he moaned, "come out wheah I can see you. Come out, you cowards, you sneakin' dogs that kills women from behind. I'se not afraid of you. Oh, I'll mash you! Come!" With a soft chug, a lance stuck quivering in the tree beside him. Otherwise all was silent; even the crow had ceased to scold. He looked down. A darker shadow was stealing among the lengthening ones on the Trail. The spirit of the forest gripped Fagan with an icy hand, the spirit of Dread. He ran blindly to the fire, seized his rifle, and took up the Trail alone.
For three days and nights he hurried on. The empty pain of his stomach, the dizzying, numbing lack of sleep, could not hold him against the dread of his unseen escort. It gave little sign, simply the rustling of a fern now and then, the swaying of one creeper when others were still, but he felt its presence and staggered on. On the evening of the third day, he stepped suddenly from the forest into a little theatre among the hills. A clear brook bubbled over golden gravel; the turf beneath a great solitary tree was thick and soft. Wild cocks in the wood were crowing their families to roost.
Everything was quiet and peaceful, and Fagan, as he gazed, became peaceful and quiet, too. He flung himself on the soft turf, and drank his fill from the little brook. As always, when he sought to rest, the forest became vague with life. A covey of jungle-fowl, flushed by a sudden fright, whirred across the opening. A stone rolled somewhere close at hand, dislodged by a purposely careless foot. But this time Fagan merely grinned, and shook off his clinging cartridge-belt. "You can' bluff me no moah," he said to the forest, a trick he had learned of late. A fern swayed not a dozen yards away, and he clicked a cartridge into his Krag and fired. "You git out," he chuckled. "I'se a gittin' tired of you' company."
When he was rested a little, he kindled a fire and toasted a bit of venison. Then he lay back lazily and twisted his last bit of tobacco into a cigarette. Between puffs he bellowed his evening song, and the rude melody took on the sweetness of a ballad. "Don' you heah the bugle callin'?" Fagan sang, and tossed the butt of the cigarette into the fire. It was quite dark now in the hollow, and he sat in a little circle of dancing light. He looked at the wall of blackness with quiet, unfrightened eyes that presently began to close with the pressure of a mighty drowsiness.
"I'se po'owful sleepy now," he announced at length, "an' I'se a gwine to bed. I was hopin' to set up an' meet some of you all, but I can't do it. When you all wants me, you all can wake me up." The fire flickered, and he pillowed his head on his arm, and watched the dance of the shadows grow shorter. "Lawszee," he murmured, drowsily, as the great numbness of sleep overcame him, "I raickon Patricia'd think I was scairt again. She'd a sat up an' waited foh them, but I can't. That little girl did have the po'owf'les' lot o' ginger in her." He threw his great arm protectingly over the empty ground beside him. "Good night, Patsí," he murmured.
In that well-remembered town among the paddies, a squat and naked man, huge-muscled, came out of the door of the quarters. In his hand he carried a broad-bladed spear. A head-axe, bright as only speckless steel can be in sunlight, flashed in his girdle. And at his back a bag, plumply round, bobbed heavily, and as it bobbed it gave out a dull jingle, as of coined metal.