out the tangled hair on one side of his head. Gradually his tremulous yelps became low howls of pain that dolefully simulated a distressed human voice.
The Man labored to his feet, for the force of his wide-swung blow had carried him off his precarious footing, His club had fallen at a wrong angle. The fury of chagrin showed in his face, but a great fear was tugging at his heart—fear lest the tumult of his accursed fiasco had been heard.
Meanwhile, he eyed the wounded dog warily as if expecting to be attacked. But the Tramp, having smothered his howls of pain, stood whining now, trembling forelegs braced apart to help his equipoise. After a little while he held his disfigured head sidewise and gazed up at the Man out of bloodshot eyes, cowed, vastly afraid, yet there seemed to be something of inquiry us to the Man's motive in the vagabond's steady look.
"Come here and shut up your infernal whining," said the Man after a moment; "and don't make this thing any worse." His growing weakness made him the more bitter. He hesitated to risk the clamor in which a second attempt on his companion outcast's life might result.
At his command the Tramp edged nearer, strangely enough, groveling, his rag of a tail drooped between his legs in abject submission.
"We've got to get out of here," muttered the Man, glancing about nervously. That which he had not had the strength to kill he would now take back as a companion and friend. It was policy. "I wish I'd thought before," he wheezed, noting the injury he had inflicted on the Tramp. "Maybe—maybe you could have caught a rabbit! But you'd play hell catching one now," he murmured grimly, regarding fixedly a tiny trickle of red that came from the Tramp's nostrils.
They went away together, the Man and the dog, both animals now, equally outcasts, the one of man, the other of man's institution, society. To all appearances they were as good friends now as before, only now the four-legged one watched the other's movements. But the higher animal felt that he had nothing to fear from the baser one, on whom he could practice any treachery, and he therefore burdened his rapidly waning strength with no useless vigilance.
And thus they went on—hunting, the Man with all the intelligence and artfulness that God had given him, the dog more weakly, inertly, as the journey lengthened, from pain and loss of blood.
About the middle of the forenoon the Man narrowly escaped detection by seven or eight men whom he chanced upon, encamped in a ravine. All were heavily armed, and the Man knew all too well that they were a sheriff's posse. Again, later in the day, the outcase caught sight of two men armed with Winchesters. They were quite near him before he became aware of their presence, but they gave no sign of having seen either him or the Tramp.
He quickly concealed himself behind a hedge and watched one of the men pointing at a wolf, which had showed itself boldly in a nearby cornfield. After a time the men separated, and one of them, a lean giant, turned and came as straight toward the Man's hiding-place as though he had divined the outcast's presence. Fortune had indeed turned traitor.
A thought of his own late perfidy came to him, but he did not wince. Morally, he did not often wince; physically his courage was merely that of many another man
He watched the tall man come nearer, steadily nearer; a large man, he was, with an easy confident stride. His calm eyes swept his surroundings leisurely, and his cool slow manner seemed in discord with the vigilance of the man-hunter. But as the man in hiding continued to watch the other, he was suddenly shaken by a tremor that rippled through every fiber of his being.
"Great God!" he whispered to the deaf and unanswering earth, "it's him!"
The Man recognized the sheriff of his own county—a man whose record of efficiency as an officer of the law had long since been written in letters of blood.
The outcast flattened himself yet closer to the earth, visions of grim walls and iron bars torturing his confused brain. Must his eleven days' awful struggle end in captivity? The thought of it kindled a new desperation in his heart.
The animal that is in all men was uppermost in the outcast. It served partly to master, to hold his terror in check, for cunning in animals is not unlike art in men. A fugitive from justice, wanted for a crime which, day on casual day for eleven such periods of torment, had by turns repelled, frightened and haunted him, the social outcast was at last at bay.
The tall sheriff came swinging slowly forward along the ridge. In a moment he was opposite the quarry. Through the apparently insufficient screen of outstanding branches he seemed to look squarely into the fugitive's eyes. For perhaps the tenth of a second he hesitated—then went on.
But the Man feared that he had in reality been seen, that the sheriff, believing him armed, had only feigned ignorance of his presence—was going straight to fetch his posse, the identical men he had seen encamped in the ravine. The fugitive was certain he knew. The sheriff's ruse was to avoid bloodshed by surrounding and overawing him. The terrible thought came to the Man like an electric flash, and simultaneously all compunction deserted him.
Every other consideration was instantly subordinated to the love of life. If he had not been essentially so before, in a twinkling the Man now became the animal wholly.
The sheriff had barely passed him when he bounded to his feet like a waiting tiger and swung his thick club. Came the supreme test of human quickness. Only the officer's keen ear warned him, for he had not caught sight of the fugitive in hiding. Like lightning the sheriff wheeled half round, his rifle at hip, but the descending club met him fair; he dropped inertly, his undischarged weapon still gripped in his hands.
The tramp-dog, coming up at the sound of the scuffle, stopped a few feet short of the gruesome object on the ground, sniffing warily, his forelegs forward as if to favor prompt retreat. The coarse hair on his fleshless back stood up like spines. He gave a single deep growl. His bloodshot eyes, oddly enough, were not on the motionless thing on the ground, but glaring at the Man, and in a way that was strangely sinister.
The sheriff's body was left where his slayer had so lately lain in hiding behind the hedge, only the corpse, as a matter of design, was somewhat better screened from observation.
The fugitive crawled a hundred yards through a weed patch, dropped into a little gully and descended toward thicker shelter. He was armed now with the spoil of his late conquest, a Winchester. The vagabond still followed him. The trickle of blood from the unhappy brute’s nose had ceased and he looked somewhat revived. Haply he had found water or a bite of food somewhere.
Soon the sun was down. The shadows deepened among the trees where the two strange fugitives, one by unexplainable choice, picked their way onward.
Once the psychological something that drove him forward in the face of nature's protests nearly forsook the Man. He sank to the ground cursing desperately in a voice that was woefully faint and wheezy and which seemed to belong to nothing that was human. It was not dissimilar to the death wail of some dying animal. The dog waited patiently
