His course from school on the evening that something happened lay through the sugar-camp.  Among the dark trunks of the maples, solemn and lofty pillars, he debated the case.  To stay, or to flee?  The worn nerves could not keep their present tension much longer.

It was just by the brook, or, as they say in Indiana, the “branch[26],” that something happened which brought him to a sudden decision.  Ralph never afterward could forget that brook.  It was a swift-running little stream, that did not babble blatantly over the stones.  It ran through a thicket of willows, through the sugar-camp, and out into Means’s pasture.  Ralph had just passed through the thicket, had just crossed the brook on the half-decayed log that spanned it, when, as he emerged from the water-willows on the other side, he started with a sudden shock.  For there was Hannah, with a white, white face, holding out a little note folded like an old-fashioned thumb-paper.

“Go quick!” she stammered as she slipped it Into Ralph’s hand, inadvertently touching his fingers with her own—­a touch that went tingling through the school-master’s nerves.  But she had hardly said the words until she was gone down the brookside path and over into the pasture.  A few minutes afterward she drove the cows up into the lot and meekly took her scolding from Mrs. Means for being gone sech an awful long time, like a lazy, good-fer-nothin piece of goods that she was.

Ralph opened the thumb-paper note, written on & page torn from an old copy-book, in Bud’s “hand-write” and running: 

     “Mr. Heartsook

     “deer Sur: 

“I Put in my best licks, taint no use.  Run fer yore life.  A plans on foot to tar an fether or wuss to-night.  Go rite off.  Things is awful juberous[27].

     “BUD.”

The first question with Ralph was whether he could depend on Bud.  But he soon made up his mind that treachery of any sort was not one of his traits.  He had mourned over the destruction of Bud’s good resolutions by Martha Hawkins’s refusal, and being a disinterested party he could have comforted Bud by explaining Martha’s “mitten.”  But he felt sure that Bud was not treacherous.  It was a relief, then, as he stood there to know that the false truce was over, and worst had come to worst.

His first impulse was to stay and fight.  But his nerves were not strong enough to execute so foolhardy a resolution.  He seemed to see a man behind every maple-trunk.  Darkness was fast coming on, and he knew that his absence from supper at his boarding-place could not fail to excite suspicion.  There was no time to be lost.  So he started.

Once run from a danger, and panic is apt to ensue.  The forest; the stalk-fields, the dark hollows through which he passed, seemed to be peopled with terrors.  He knew Small and Jones well enough to know that every avenue of escape would be carefully picketed.  So there was nothing to do but to take the shortest path to the old trysting place, the Spring-in-rock.