conveyance at night, as the coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.  He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers, as they already knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise to present himself in his newer reputation of a man who had just slain a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered.  He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the brushing branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road.  Then, more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the steaming underbrush.  Here he lay still until the clatter of harness and the sound of voices faded in the distance.  Had he been followed, it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any semblance to a known form or figure.  A hideous, reddish mask of dust and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated in his trailing sleeves.  And when he rose, staggering like a drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments clung to the impeding branches.  Twice he fell, but, maddened and upheld by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he kept on his course.

Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once, when he stopped and leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the distance before him.  Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.  The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical interruption—­the glassy tinkle of water!  A step further his foot trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the interlacing boughs overhead.  A tiny stream that he could have dammed with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed and sent its slight surplus on.  It had been the luxurious retreat of many a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott.  Without a moment’s hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop.  His head disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.  Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,—­his revolver and tobacco pouch.