Chapter 3 - Page 2

searchers and he walked more rapidly than they, for his muscles were younger and his wind unimpaired by dissipation. For a time he carried the small automatic in his hand; but later, hearing no evidence of pursuit, he returned it to the pocket in his coat where it had lain when it had saved him from death beneath the blade of the degenerate Charlie.

For an hour he continued walking rapidly along the winding country road. He was very tired; but he dared not pause to rest. Always behind him he expected the sudden onslaught of the bearded, blear-eyed followers of The Sky Pilot. Terror goaded him to supreme physical effort. Recollection of the screaming man sinking to the earthen floor of the hay barn haunted him. He was a murderer! He had slain a fellow man. He winced and shuddered, increasing his gait until again he almost ran --ran from the ghost pursuing him through the black night in greater terror than he felt for the flesh and blood pursuers upon his heels.

And Nature drew upon her sinister forces to add to the fear which the youth already felt. Black clouds obscured the moon blotting out the soft kindliness of the greening fields and transforming the budding branches of the trees to menacing and gloomy arms which appeared to hover with claw-like talons above the dark and forbidding road. The wind soughed with gloomy and increasing menace, a sudden light flared across the southern sky followed by the reverberation of distant thunder.

Presently a great rain drop was blown against the youth's face; the vividness of the lightning had increased; the rumbling of the thunder had grown to the proportions of a titanic bombardment; but he dared not pause to seek shelter.

Another flash of lightning revealed a fork in the road immediately ahead--to the left ran the broad, smooth highway, to the right a dirt road, overarched by trees, led away into the impenetrable dark.

The fugitive paused, undecided. Which way should he turn? The better travelled highway seemed less mysterious and awesome, yet would his pursuers not naturally assume that he had followed it? Then, of course, the right hand road was the road for him. Yet still he hesitated, for the right hand road was black and forbidding; suggesting the entrance to a pit of unknown horrors.

As he stood there with the rain and the wind, the thunder and the lightning, horror of the past and terror of the future his only companions there broke suddenly through the storm the voice of a man just ahead and evidently approaching along the highway.

The youth turned to flee; but the thought of the men tracking him from that direction brought him to a sudden halt. There was only the road to the right, then, after all. Cautiously he moved toward it, and at the same time the words of the voice came clearly through the night:

"'. . . as, swinging heel and toe,

'We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road