Page 186 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

upon his own track to the settlement! More than half his al-
lotted time had passed, and he was not yet thirty miles from
his prison. Death had waited to overtake him in this barba-
rous wilderness. As a cat allows a mouse to escape her for a
while, so had he been permitted to trifle with his fate, and
lull himself into a false security. Escape was hopeless now.
He never could escape; and as the unhappy man raised his
despairing eyes, he saw that the sun, redly sinking behind
a lofty pine which topped the opposite hill, shot a ray of
crimson light into the glade below him. It was as though
a bloody finger pointed at the corpse which lay there, and
Rufus Dawes, shuddering at the dismal omen, averting his
face, plunged again into the forest.
For four days he wandered aimlessly through the bush.
He had given up all hopes of making the overland journey,
and yet, as long as his scanty supply of food held out, he
strove to keep away from the settlement. Unable to resist
the pangs of hunger, he had increased his daily ration; and
though the salted meat, exposed to rain and heat, had be-
gun to turn putrid, he never looked at it but he was seized
with a desire to eat his fill. The coarse lumps of carrion and
the hard rye-loaves were to him delicious morsels fit for the
table of an emperor. Once or twice he was constrained to
pluck and eat the tops of tea-trees and peppermint shrubs.
These had an aromatic taste, and sufficed to stay the crav-
ings of hunger for a while, but they induced a raging thirst,
which he slaked at the icy mountain springs. Had it not
been for the frequency of these streams, he must have died
in a few days. At last, on the twelfth day from his departure

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