Chapter X. The Pursuit.

When William Dillon formed the sudden resolution to make a dash for liberty and life, he had not the faintest idea of how he was to accomplish his wish, or what chance there was of his making good his escape. It was entirely unpremeditated, and was the result of the overwhelming anxiety caused by his allusion to the coming probable destitution of his family, when the sight of the windows within reach gave a stimulus to the desperate thought.

Had he known the height at which the window was from the alley below, he would not have tempted certain death. Fortuately for him, the swirling winds had piled up a huge snow wreath in the alley, into the middle of which he fell, so that when he was able to extricate himself from the snow, he found himself, somewhat to his surprise, entirely uninjured.

To rush from the passage and turn the corner was the work of an instant. He knew that the sight of a man flying up the street at headlong pace was likely to attract attention, but he equally knew that the least delay would insure his capture by the police, who would soon be on his tracks.

Fortunately, the severity of the night had shut up the townspeople within doors, and in the side-street into which he turned on the first opportunity, there was not one abroad. Looking back, he could see and hear the rush of policemen past the head of the street in page 23 which he was, but not one of them seemed to think it necessary to turn down the way he had come.

It led him into a small country road, on which he felt assured that he would be unlikely to meet with anyone on such a night, and as this led to a bleak upland moor in a remote and unfrequented district, he thought that it might afford him at least temporary safety from pursuit.

All this time he had but little hope that he would make good his escape from the hands of the law. The country was swarming with police; the poor people were cowed down and terrified, and though he knew that hundreds of them would sympathise with him or with anyone that they might suppose to have violated the law, he did not think they would be able, even if they were willing, to give him concealment. Rewards, too, of a greatly increased kind, as for an actually convicted murderer, were sure to be issued and to prove an irresistible temptation to people so wretchedly and hopelessly poor.

With these considerations gradually sapping the courage of his resolution, he had begun to regret that he had made such a futile attempt to escape, where any means of leaving the country seemed so utterly out of the question, and as he struggled up a long steep hill leading to the moor, he felt inclined to give it up and go back and surrender to justice.

But life was very sweet, and the little taste he had had of freedom, and the new hope of life which had been inspired within the past half-hour, made disgrace and death doubly repulsive; and then, when he thought of his beloved wife and children, and the possibility that he might yet meet them in some land of safety far away, where the pursuer could not follow, it nerved him for another effort.

As he reached the top of the hill, he was compelled to pause for breath. Looking back the way he had come, he listened attentively. The snow was falling so heavily that he could see but a small distance, and he was pleased to observe that it totally concealed the track of his footsteps. But his sense of hearing, intensely quickened, detected the rattling as of sabres, and instantly after he recognised the muffled sound of horses' feet on the soft snow on the very road on which he had come. He was pursued, he felt convinced that he was, and that whether they had actually traced his footateps, or whether it was that the patrols meant to search every road in the whole country round, the troopers were on his track.

Nearer and nearer the muffled sound approached, and though the thickness of the snowfall prevented him from seeing them, he knew that his pursuers could not be many hundred yards away.

What was he to do? To move from where he was would leave fresh tracks which the snowfall would not have time to cover, to stand where he was was, of course, certain capture. He could almost fancy that he saw the troopers through the haze.

He was beside a stone fence, on which, from the position of the stones, the snow had been irregularly retained, the dark lichen-covered slabs alternating with the white covering of snow. He saw that his footsteps on the rude stone wall could hardly be recognised. He cautiously planted his feet between the stones so as to cause as little disturbance of the snow as possible, and bounded over the wall. He landed in a deep snow drift, in which he quickly buried himself, burrowing along the bottom through the snow.

Not a moment too soon. He heard the tramp of a cavalcade of troopers sweeping past, and the rattling of their scabbards, and the earnest, but suppressed orders of the officer in command. Whether they had seen and lost the tracks, or had come to the conclusion that the prisoner could not have succeeded in reaching such a distance from the town in the short time that had elapsed since his escape, the troopers shortly after returned and stopped opposite his place of concealment.

Though the sound was deadened by the snow in which he was surrounded, he could pick up words of the conversation, among which he distinctly heard his own name mentioned.

After the consultation had proceeded for about ten minutes he heard the troopers mount their horses and slowly ride off in the direction of the town. He hesitated whether he should remain in his place of concealment, or continue his flight. Perhaps it was but a ruse to lure him from his hiding place; perhaps having lost the trail they had given up the pursuit. He felt a stifling sensation from the closeness of the covering of snow. He raised his arm and gradually scooped out a hole in the covering, so as to admit the air.

For two long hours he lay concealed chilled to the bone by the melting snow, which had penetrated and saturated his clothing. At last, when no sound was heard to indicate that his pursuers had returned, he proceeded to extricate himself from the snow-drift.

He raised his head and looked around. The snow was still falling, but he could see or hear no sign of the presence of the foe. He slowly raised himself and looked over the fence. He glanced up and down the road, but he could see nothing through the blinding snow.

He had begun to feel that he was safe and raised himself a little higher, when his eye fell on an object that transfixed him with horror. There, right before him, on the other side of the further fence, was a trooper deliberately looking at him.

There are moments, we are told, in men's page 24 lives, crises of their being, when the whole events of one's past history pass in a moment in detailed review before the mind. Men who have been rescued from drowning say that in the moment when the vital spark was flickering, and they stood on the confines of death and life, all their past with all its tale of joys and sorrows, anxieties and hopes, passed slowly over the page of memory, and years of life and its vicissitudes were lived over again in an instant of time.

It was only for a moment that Dillon and the trooper looked eye to eye, but in that moment the fugitive saw all the past with all its burthen of happiness and grief, pass like a burning picture before his eye.

It was but a moment. He saw the trooper raise his carbine, he heard the click of the lock, and he knew that the carbine had missed fire. He saw the trooper fling the weapon away and leap the fence.

Now, Dillon, for dear life! He bounded from the ditch. Onward! Onward! with the trooper but a few yards behind. Over the fields, with their deep covering of snow; over fences; past houses and farmyards, where the startled cattle in their shelter sheds jumped to their feet and pricked their ears; where the startled watch-dogs sounded their alarm. Onward! Onward! still onward!

It was at this moment that miles away a little white-robed angel on bended knees was pleading for her father, and asking that the guardian angels might be sent away to cover him with their wings. Was it this that gave the fleetness to his feet, cramped and chilled as he had been with lying in the snow? Was it this that gave him courage to persevere when the possibility of final escape from his pursuers must have passed beyond the bounds of hope? Onward! still onward!

Dillon looked around, and he could see that he was gaining on his pursuer, that the heavy accoutrements, the riding boots, the scabbard, with which the man was hampered had begun to tell, and he felt that if he could himself but keep the pace, he must ultimately distance his pursuer.

Onward! still onward! Keeping a keen look-out as to where he was running, he approached a ravine in which he saw that the snow drift had accumulated. With a terrific bound be barely cleared the chasm. He looked around, his pursuer had disappeared, buried in the snow.

Onward! still onward! but no sign of his pursuer. He felt that now he had been lost to sight he should double on his pursuer instead of continuing the straight course which the trooper would be sure to follow on extricating himself from the snow.

He turned away to the left, plunging down into the valley below. Crossing a number of meadows and ascending the hills on the farther side, he knew that now it would be safe to pause. Feeing confidence that for the time at least he had escaped pursuit, he threw himself on the snow.

The place seemed known to him. He had taken no note of the direction of his flight, his thoughts had been so entirely absorbed in the effort to escape. But now the hills seemed familiar to him. He stood up and looked around, when he found that the place on which he stood was on the top of the heights on the farther side of the loch from his home, a wild and desolate district, where the inhabitants were few, eking out a miserable existence on an inhospitable soil.

It was the scene, he knew, of the latest evictions that had been authorised by the unfortunate agent, and for which no doubt that gentleman had come to his untimely end. Dillon expected therefore to find no inhabitants, and his prospects of shelter and food—for he felt completely exhausted—were very scanty.

After he had rested for some time he saw the necessity of continuing his journey, and, if possible, finding a habitation, if he was not to spend the whole night on the bleak mountain-side.

After crossing some fields, he reached the road, a narrow bridle track which led from the public road that skirted the margin of the loch, away up over the desolate highlands that stretched away for miles and miles to the west.

With the still falling snow he could not make out the waters of the loch, but he felt assured that in daylight or in a clearer night not only could he look down on the loch, but on his own farm and the cottage in which all that he loved best on earth were contained.

Proceeding along the road in the direction of the loch he soon became conscious that he was approaching human habitations. He heard the barking of a dog, and, as he thought, the distant sound of human voices, and while he listened—from a little glen below, into which the road descended—there arose that weird wail of grief which once heard is never to be forgotten.

It was the ‘keena,’ or Irish cry for the dead, in which the pent-up grief of the affectionate and passionate Celtic nature finds utterance. In melancholy cadence it rose and fell on the still night air, now breaking forth in a wild plaintive melody, then dying away till it blended with the sound of the winds sweeping up the desolate hill-side.

Dillon knew it well, and how the mourners, in their own poetic way, apostrophised the dead and asked the spirit why it had gone away, and reminded it of the loving services and the kind hands that had tried to stay its flight to the great spirit-land.

As he descended the hill, he soon realised the position. On either side of the road; in the ditch or ‘shough,’ as it is called, were a number of rude shelters formed in some page 25 cases of blankets or old counterpanes or bagging, reaching across the ahough and resting against the fence, the miserable shelter-sheds to which hundreds of evicted peasantry have been compelled to betake them in the bleakness of an Irish winter when driven from their homes.

A heavy covering of snow gave uniformity to the motley structures, and, no doubt, closing the rents gave greater warmth to the inhabitants within; but as Dillon passed noiselessly along on the snow-carpeted road, an occasional moan of pain, and the incoherent mutterings of delirium quite as much as the doleful keena which had first arrested his attention, told him that the terrible famine fever was doing its baleful work within.

Dillon had passed nearly the whole length of this settlement of sheds, some thirty or forty in number, without seeing any one from whom he could make enquiry. At last stopping at one of them, he asked if there was any one within. A little ragged girl with hair unkempt and wild, her scanty clothing fluttering in the wind, came out of the hut and asked the stranger what he wanted. He said he wished to know the names of the people on the hill, and she told him a number of names, from which he knew that they were mainly the last batch of sufferers that had been dispossessed of their farms, with a few who were surviving or remaining of those who had been evicted a few months before.

He asked if Widow O'Shea was among the number on the hill, and she answered ‘Yes,’ and directed him to the but where the old woman lived; and with a sore heart Dillon stood before the wretched shelter covering the aged head of the mother of his late and faithful servant, Tom O'Shea. He asked if there was anyone within; the old blanket that served for a door was drawn aside, and Tom himself was before him.

‘Tom, is that you? Don't speak loud, Tom, take me in.’

‘God save us all! it's the Masther. Oh, mother, here's—–’

‘Hush! Tom, for God's sake hush! take me in and hide me!’

‘Oh, masther! masther!’ whispered Tom, ‘for the love of God what is wrong wid you; or have you got away from the divils, or howiver is it, at all, at all?’

‘Can I be safe here, Tom? Can you hide me? They were going to hang me, Tom, and I got away from them.’

‘Yes, masther, dear, the peelers will niver come near us; they're afraid of the faver, and divil a one of them will come nearer than a mile of you if they think ye've got the faver.’

‘Oh, Tom, I have had a terrible escape.’ And Dillon told his old and faithful servant of the incidents that had occurred, and the way in which he had found his way to the hut.

Tom listened with breathless wonder to the story; while the old mother, who could hardly follow the whole account, but only knew that Tom's master had been in danger of being hanged and had escaped, kept rocking herself to and fro with a melancholy whine that sounded like a suppressed keena, and seemed the very expression of heartbroken despair.

The plan of action was soon formed. Tom declared that he was ready to shed his last drop of blood for his masther, and promised to act strictly by his orders.

The first of these was that no one should know who he was, and that if the police came around, Dillon was to be laid up with a dreadful case of fever.

Tom laid before him such simple food as he had, which Dillon, who had taken nothing to eat since the morning, and had gone in that time through such a physical and mental strain, partook heartily. The faithful fellow then, seeing that his master's clothes were saturated with wet, insisted on exchanging at least part of them for some of his own.

On the dry straw spread for him on the few boards which formed the flooring of the hut, Dillon laid himself down at Tom's request; exhausted nature could do no more, and the poor hunted fugitive was soon soundly and calmly in the arms of Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep.