He felt so exultant that he laughed.  It would be easy enough now to distance this Union troop.  Then the laugh died suddenly on his lips.  A bullet whistled so near his face that it almost took away his breath.  An elderly farmer standing in his own door had fired it, and Harry snatched one of the pistols from his own belt, remembering then with rage that it could not be fired.  He shouted to his horse and made him run faster.

A bullet struck the pommel of his saddle and glanced off.  A boy in an orchard had fired it.  A load of bird-shot, a handful it seemed to Harry, flew about his ears.  A bent old man who ought to have been sitting on a porch in a rocking chair had discharged it from the edge of a wood.  A squirrel hunter on a hill took a pot shot at him and missed.

Harry was furious with anger.  Decidedly this was no place for a visitor from the South.  He did not detect the faintest sign of hospitality.  Men and women alike seemed to dislike him.  A powerful virago hurled a stone at his head, which would have struck him senseless had it not missed, and a farmer standing by a fence had a shotgun cocked and ready to be fired as he passed, but Harry, snatching one of the useless pistols from his belt, hurled it at him with all his might.  It struck the man a glancing blow on the head, felling him as if he had been shot, and then Harry, thinking quickly, acted with equal quickness.

He reined in his horse with such suddenness that he nearly shot from the saddle.  Then he leaped down, seized the shotgun from under the hands of the fallen man, sprang on his horse and was away again, sending back a cry of defiance.

Harry had never before in his life been so furious.  To be hunted thus by a whole countryside, as if he were a mad dog, was intolerable.  It was not only a threat to one’s life, it was also an insult to one’s dignity to be treated as an animal.  Although he was armed now the insult continued.  The call of the trumpet sounded almost without ceasing, and the Union troopers uttered many shouts as do those who chase the fox, although Harry knew that their cries were intended to rouse the farmers who might head him off.

The chase grew hotter, but he felt better with the shotgun.  It was a fine double-barreled weapon of the latest make, and he hoped that it was loaded with buckshot.  He was a sharpshooter, and he could give a good account of any one who came too near.

Yet with the trumpet shrilling continually behind him the huntsmen gathered fast on either flank.  It was yet the day when nearly every house in America, outside a town, contained a rifle, and bullets fired from a distance began to patter around Harry and his horse.  The riflemen were too far away to be reached with the shotgun, and it seemed inevitable to him that in time a bullet would strike him.  He was truly the fox, and he knew that nothing could save him but forest.

It was in his favor that the country was so broken and wooded so heavily, and fixing his eyes on trees a half-mile ahead he raced for them.  If none of this yelling pack dragged him down he felt sure that he might escape again in the forest.  The trees swiftly came nearer, but the shots on either flank increased.  More than ever he felt like the fox with the hounds all about him, and just one slender chance to reach the burrow ahead.