Nevertheless, there came Bart with the ill tidings, and it only remained to
skirt swiftly east, round the dangerous ground, and strike the marshes
first. He swung Satan around on the new course with a pressure of his knees
and loosed him into a freer gallop.
They must have sensed the meaning of this maneuver at once, for hardly had
he stretched out east when voices shouted out of the hills, and around and
over several low knolls came forty horsemen, racing. Half a dozen were
already due east--no escape that way; and the long line of the others came
straight at him with the slope of the ground to give them velocity.
Chapter XXXIV. The Warning
All in a grim instant he saw the trap. It closed upon his consciousness
with a click, and as he doubled Satan around he knew that the only escape
was in running southeast along the banks of the Asper. Even that was a
desperate, a forlorn chance, for if that omnipotent voice could reach from
Rickett to Caswell City, fifty miles away, certainly it must have warned
the river towns of Ganton and Wilsonville and Bly Falls where Tucker Creek
ran into the Asper.
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