Night fell, but he ran on, stumbling and faint with
dread, tears rolling down his thin cheeks, sobs in his throat.
Darkness hid the sign-boards from view; he reeled from one side of the
narrow, Stygian lane to the other, sustaining many falls and bruises,
but always coming to his feet with the unflagging determination to
fight his way onward.
Half-dazed, gasping for breath and ready to drop in his tracks, he
came at last to the open valley. Far ahead and below were the lights
of a town--he could only hope that it was S----. Tortured by the vast
oppressiveness of the solitude which lay behind him, peopled by a
thousand ghosts whose persistent footsteps had haunted him through
every mile of his flight, he cried aloud as he stumbled down the rain-
washed hill,--cried with the terror of one who sees collapse after
human valor has been done to death.
He was never to know how he came, in the course of an hour, to the
outskirts of the town. His mind, distracted by the terror of pursuit,
refused to record the physical exertions of that last bitter hour; his
body labored mechanically, without cognizance of the strain put upon
it.
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