Tuesday the twenty-eighth of October passed with no tidings of Ruggam’s capture.  The Holmes boy was fatally shot by a rattleheaded searcher near Five-Mile Pond, and distraught parents began to take thought of their own lads missing from school.  Adam MacQuarry broke his leg near the Hell Hollow schoolhouse and was sent back by friends on a borrowed bobsled.  Several ne’er-do-wells, long on impulse and short on stickability, drifted back to more comfortable quarters during the day, contending that if Hap were captured, the officers would claim the reward anyhow—­so what was the use bucking the System?

The snowfall stopped in the early morning.  Sunrise disclosed the world trimmed from horizon to horizon in fairy fluff.  Householders jocosely shoveled their walks; small children resurrected attic sleds; here and there a farmer appeared on Main Street during the forenoon in a pung-sleigh or cutter with jingling bells.  The sun soared higher, and the day grew warmer.  Eaves began dripping during the noon hour, to stop when the sun sank about four o’clock behind Bancroft’s hill.

After the sunset came a perfect evening.  The starlight was magic.  Many people called in at the newspaper-office, after the movies, to learn if the man hunt had brought results.

Between ten and eleven o’clock the lights on the valley floor blinked out; the town had gone to bed—­that is, the lights blinked out in all homes excepting those on the eastern outskirts, where nervous people worried over the possibilities of a hungry, hunted convict’s burglarizing their premises, or drawn-faced mothers lived mentally through a score of calamities befalling red-blooded sons who had now been absent twenty-four hours.

Sometime between nine o’clock and midnight—­she had no way of telling accurately—­Cora McBride stumbled into the Lyons clearing.  No one would have recognized in the staggering, bedraggled apparition that emerged from the silhouette of the timber the figure that had started so confidently from the Harrison tract the previous evening.

For over an hour she had hobbled blindly.  It was wholly by accident that she had stumbled into the clearing.  And the capture of Ruggam had diminished in importance.  Warm food, water that would not tear her raw throat, a place to lie and recoup her strength after the chilling winter night—­these were the only things that counted now.  Though she knew it not, in her eyes burned the faint light of fever.  When a snag caught her snowshoe and tripped her, there was hysteria in her cry of resentment.

As she moved across from the timber-line her hair was revealed fallen down; she had lost a glove, and one hand and wrist were cruelly red where she had plunged them several times into the snow to save herself from falling upon her face.  She made but a few yards before the icy thong of her right snowshoe snapped.  She did not bother to repair it.  Carrying it beneath her arm, she hobbled brokenly toward the shelter of the buildings.