At this sudden display of agility and damage, the flabbergasted spectators shrank back. Nathan crashed another blow at the gaping features of a lean fellow who barred his way to the fence. Over the fence went the Yankee and into the murk.
And bedlam broke loose behind him! Hoarse bellows roared in the fog. Shots snapped. A group of horses by the gate began stampeding. The log house spilled soldiers and officers, and the yard bumbled like a nest of yellow-jackets.
Nathan tripped on the other side the fence and went down on his face. He cut a gash across his forehead that for the moment blinded him. But he ran—ran somehow—ran wildly.
He was suddenly thankful for the fog. It enveloped him. It shut off pursuit.
Down the hill he fled, guiding himself by weak, nebulous window lights from huts on either hand. He knew a mob was trailing after. Horses were coming. Two shots cracked in quick succession. The boy felt a deadly, cruel kick in his left arm. In an instant the arm went numb. Something warm and sticky dripped from his fingers. He had been shot. The arm was bleeding.
Into a passageway between two houses he dodged, on into cattle runs behind. Again he was living by moments. He smashed head-on into a diminutive cow. Which was the most terrified will never be known. But he did not lose his sense of direction. Down the hill the road by which they had entered the settlement turned at right angles northward, out toward that great defile in the hills. His pursuers had lost him in the fog. He skirted through back yards, climbed endless fences, bumped into all sorts of palings and impedimenta. But he reached the bottom of that incline.
There were hoarse shoutings all about him. Several more shots were fired wildly. A group of breathless, running men passed within three feet of where he crouched in the shadow of a gate.
The place swarmed with frustrated Bolsheviks who had been cheated of their quarry, outwitted by a Yankee! Nathan left it swarming. He got onto the steppe’s road and headed off northward into soggy, inky night. And fog! That fog!
The boy had a blind instinct to strike back toward the railroad. The railroad meant a frail chance for stopping a troop train and rejoining his fellows. Yet hunting the railroad in that fog was like groping for a lost love in Abaddon.
He walked into a post and had the breath knocked from him, learning that he had not yet reached the edge of the village. He stumbled over old boards, half-buried in muck. After that he groped his way more carefully with his one good arm.