Tom Akerley / His Adventures in the Tall Timber and at Gaspard's Clearing on the Indian River

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

Tom received these things from her hands with mumbled words of thanks. He behaved so awkwardly that he dropped the tobacco and had to get down on his hands and knees to recover it.

“Snowshoes and moccasins,” she whispered. “I almost forgot them; and I’m sure it will snow before morning.”

Again she slipped into the sleeping house; and again she returned, this time with a pair of cowhide moccasins, an assortment of woolen socks and two pairs of snowshoes. They retired to a safe distance from the house and there made everything into a pack of sorts. She helped him lift the pack to his shoulders and adjust it.

“Now you must go, you must hurry,” she said.

He extended his mittened hands and rested them lightly on her shoulders.

“I’ll go—and I’ll hurry, of course,” he replied, in husky and hurried tones. “But if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t move an inch—I’d let them catch me and court-martial me and break me. Hunted by those fellows! A fugitive! But they’ll forget it some day—and that’s the day I am praying for—the day when I can tell you what I think of you, Cathie MacKim!”

Next moment she was gone from beneath his extended hands—gone, and vanished in the gloom toward the blacker gloom of the silent house.

He stood motionless for fully a minute, scarcely breathing, with his hands still extended. Then his arms sank slowly to his sides and his breath escaped in a gasping sigh of suggestive astonishment and even greater emotion. He hitched his pack higher, turned abruptly and headed northward through the cold and dark. But cold as it was and dark as it was he felt as warm as toast and stepped out as assuredly as if the sun were shining.

“By thunder, she kissed me!” he whispered. “Quick as winking—but that is what it was! They can’t catch me now, the poor Rubes—not in fifty years!”

He would probably have continued in this high strain for several minutes had he not strode squarely into the raking barrier of a brush-fence. After that, he walked with more circumspection; but in spite of a scratched face and a barked skin he felt at the top of his form.