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And then the little bell in his watch tinkled the hour of ten! He sat up with a jerk For a space he held his breath while he listened In the hall outside his room there was no sound An inch at a time he drew hi on hooks in the wall, and he groped his way to the at the crack of his door would not have heard him He dressed swiftly Then he made his way to the , looked out, and listened

In the brilliant starlight he saw nothing but the thite stubs of the lightning-shattered trees in which the owls lived And it was very still The air was fresh and sweet in his face In it he caught the scent of the distant balsaht silence, waited for him It was impossible for him to conceive of failure or death out there, and it seemed unreal and trivial that the Law should expect to hold hi him

Assured that the moment for action was at hand, he h the , and his feet were on the ground For a space he stood out clear in the starlight Then he hurried to the end of the building and hid hiht him no physical discomfort, and his blood danced with the thrill of the earth under his feet and the thought that his wound must be even more completely healed than he had supposed A wild exultation swept over hi and talking to hi hione north on the breast of it, and that if he hastened it would help him to overtake her He felt the throb of new life in his body His eyes shone strangely in the seone She could not be far away, even now And in these lory of new life, she was different for him from what she had ever been She was a part of hi of her She beca soul of his wilderness He felt her presence The thought possessed hi of hi him And in that same flash he made up his mind that he would not discard the boat, as he had planned; he would conceal hiht, until at last he came to Marette Radisson And then he would tell her why he had come And after that-He looked toward Crossen's place He would ht for it, openly, like a man bent on a ht, and Crossen was abed, he would be on the river within fifteen minutes His blood ran faster as he took his first step out into the open starlight Fifty yards ahead of hian used for his fuel Safely beyond that, no one could see him from the s of the hospital He walked swiftly Twenty paces, thirty, forty--and he stopped as suddenly as the half-breed's bullet had stopped hian's fuel house ca his little cane and traveling quietly as a cat They were not ten feet apart, yet Kent had not heard him