had risen, out among the snags. Often when I had been fishing and left the lake just at dusk like this, full of its immense and lonely quiet, I had wondered what it would be like to know that I would never see it again, and now that I was looking at it for probably the last time I was conscious of nothing except that I did not want to think about it. I walked deliberately out into it, and as the water rose to my waist I started to swim. Halfway across I began to wonder if I would make it, exhausted as I was to the point of collapse and weighted with the shoes and clothes, but somehow I kept going. I fought my way through fifty yards of the entangling pads on the other shore and climbed gasping onto the bank. It was dark now, completely black among the trees.
I had to go straight ahead, but how? Five or six miles due west I would begin to hit the rising ground and the pines, but all the intervening distance was flat, unvarying bottom country full of sloughs and heavily timbered, with no landmarks and only glimpses of the stars. With my back against the lake shore and facing the direction in which I wanted to go, I studied the sky a moment to line up the few constellations I knew, then plunged into the darkness. I lost track of the number of times I fell and the number of sloughs I waded and swam and finally just wallowed through. I bumped into trees and entangled myself in vines, and each time I plunged to the ground it was more difficult to rise again. A dreamy lassitude would begin to flow over me like warm water and I would want to lie there in the hope that if I slept and then awoke the whole horrible dream would be gone and I would open my eyes to find that we were on the plane to San Francisco and were circling over the bay ready to land in the early dawn. Then the terror would come sweeping back and with it the bitter knowledge that if I did not get out of here before daylight I was finished, and I would force myself to rise and go staggering on. By daybreak they would have the dogs in here and I would no longer be able to hide, and of course I couldn’t get across the highway and into town except very late at night, if I could at all.
It was a dream at first, and then a nightmare, and at last an eternal and monotonous black hell without fires or light where I was doomed to go staggering forward and forever falling. After a while I began to believe I was losing my mind, because for long periods she would be moving along beside me. Once I turned and called her name aloud. The sudden sound of my voice in the silence of the forest shocked me into consciousness of what I had done, and terror took hold of me again and I thought for a moment I would cry out and run.
Time had no meaning now. It might have been an hour since I had left the lake and it might have been five. I could have covered four miles, or I could be walking in circles and be almost back there again. But then, suddenly, when I fell again I felt the dry, aromatic slickness of pine needles under my face and threw my hands about wildly, grasping at them. I had come out of the bottom and was beginning to mount the ridge.
An almost insane urgency took hold of me and I wanted to run. I had come this far, across that black maze of bottom, and suppose now that daylight should catch me before I got to Dinah’s? The difficult part, the almost impossible part, lay behind, but ahead was all the danger. I had to get into town, where everybody knew me, and being seen by anyone would mean disaster. After I got up on the ridge in the fairly open pines I could make better time, and before long I began to see the winking of lights below me and knew I had reached the highway. I turned and plunged downhill.
What time was it? That was the only thing in my mind now. I still had nearly four miles to go to get