CHAPTER XV

GAY DISCOVERS HIMSELF

As Gay passed rapidly down the Haunt’s Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there, listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps.  At the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, “Blossom!  Are you there, Blossom?” The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes.

“Damn you!” said a voice almost in a whisper.  The next instant a shot rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its load into the air.  His first confused impression was that he had knocked against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side.  Then, as a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise, “I’m shot.  By Jove, that’s what it means—­I’m shot.”  At the instant, underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him.  But while the wonder was still engrossing him—­in that same instant, which seemed to cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting.  “It’s ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me,” he thought, while the little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud obscured it.

A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke in the cloudless blue.  He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping again into oblivion.  For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a leaf on the stream.  Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond, he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something—­at anything—­that would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing sound of the river about him.  But in spite of his struggles, this current—­which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side, and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the graveyard—­this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther away from the thing to which he was clinging—­from this thing he could not let go because it was himself—­because it had separated and distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe.  “I’ve