Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/118

 *hind, but the shot informed me that, despite the perilous nearness of my pursuers, they saw that I must be the first within the wood, where horses could not follow, and among that continent of branch and herbage they knew that their search must prove most difficult. Evidently they meant to stay my entrance, cost what it may.

Another shot yelped out at me, another, and then another. One touched my hat, I think, but that was all. Verily the devil was wonderfully kind this morning.

And strange as you may think it, I felt pretty callous to these bullets. Nay, I was not afraid of anything. My spirit had thrown for once the fetters of convention off. It was itself for one brief hour. It was part of the earth and the trees, the snow and the moonlight; free as air and primitive as nature. 'Twas running unimpeded under God's moon, without any of our eighteenth-century fopperies of brocades and powders on it.

I scrambled through the ditch and out again, brushed through the hedge-gap at the cost of cloak rents and a briar in my hand, and found myself within the thicket. I plunged into the deepest I could find, but as I did so a new volley rattled above my head among the trees, and the splinters from a shattered bough missed my face by inches and fell across the path. Knowing the ground so thoroughly I could take a great advantage of it, and sure every bit of it was needed, for the soldiers were desperately close. There was so thick a roof