Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/112

 night journey with Shokatan, it had seemed to him mysterious, wonderful, teeming with adventure. But now it seemed only dark, threatening and cruel, as though it existed merely to shelter  dangers and hidden enemies, as though the rolling hills and valleys swept up to his feet to drown  him in a sea of green.

“I mustn’t get excited,” he kept telling himself, “I must keep my head.”

But even as he so thought, he knew that his brain was reeling and that his bewilderment was  increasing every moment.

“I will go back just the way I came,” was his  first plan, but it proved impossible to follow. He found traces here and there of where he had  passed before, yet the way was so twisted and  uncertain that, after an hour of struggling  through the underbrush he finally came out on  the same ridge again and faced the same mass of red rock. He climbed the steep bowlder once more to make sure that he had not been mistaken  and, on seeing again that vast pitiless expanse of  forest, all calmness suddenly left him. He slid