He had
chosen the latter--instinctively and on the spur of the moment; and while
he might have repeated at leisure the decision he had made in haste, he
knew even now that he was leaving the ways and means of proving his
innocence behind him. The perception came, not as the result of a process
of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected sensation.
He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than
mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually gathers
strength, as it rolls inland, to toss up the crests of the Adirondacks.
Here, burying himself in the woods, he skirted the unkempt farms, whose
cottage lights, just beginning to burn, served him as signals to keep
farther off. When forced to cross one of the sterile fields, he crawled
low, blotting himself out among the bowlders. At times a patch of tall,
tasselled Indian corn, interlaced with wandering pumpkin vines, gave him
cover, till he regained the shelter of the vast Appalachian mother-forest
which, after climbing Cumberlands, Alleghanies, Catskills, and
Adirondacks, here clambers down, in long reaches of ash and maple, juniper
and pine, toward the lowlands of the north.
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