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be done! With prudence, it could be done! He must be care-
ful and abstemious! Abstemious! He had already eaten too
much, and he hastily pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat
from his mouth, and replaced it with the rest. The action
which at any other time would have seemed disgusting, was,
in the case of this poor creature, merely pitiable.
Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to
disencumber himself of his irons. This was more easily
done than he expected. He found in the shed an iron gad,
and with that and a stone he drove out the rivets. The rings
were too strong to be ‘ovalled’,* or he would have been free
long ago. He packed the meat and bread together, and then
pushing the gad into his belt—it might be needed as a weap-
on of defence—he set out on his journey.
[Footnote]* Ovalled—‘To oval’ is a term in use among
convicts, and means so to bend the round ring of the ankle
fetter that the heel can be drawn up through it.
His intention was to get round the settlement to the
coast, reach the settled districts, and, by some tale of ship-
wreck or of wandering, procure assistance. As to what was
particularly to be done when he found himself among free
men, he did not pause to consider. At that point his difficul-
ties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert
that was before him, and he would trust to his own ingenu-
ity, or the chance of fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril
of immediate detection was so imminent that, beside it, all
other fears were dwarfed into insignificance.
Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles,
and by husbanding his food, he succeeded by the night of

1 For the Term of His Natural Life