“I couldn’t forget Uncle Bob if I tried—­” he told himself, with quivering lips, as he limped wearily along the dusty road, and the tears welled up and streaked his pinched face.  Now before him he saw the scattered lights of a settlement.  All his terrors, the terrors that grouped themselves about the idea of pursuit and capture, rushed back upon him, and in a panic he plunged into the black woods again.

But the distant lights intensified his loneliness.  He had lived a whole day without food, a whole day without speech.  He began to skirt the settlement, keeping well within the thick gloom of the woods, and presently, as he stumbled forward, he came to a small clearing in the center of which stood a log dwelling.  The place seemed deserted.  There was no sign of life, no light shone from the window, no smoke issued from the stick-and-mud chimney.

Tilted back in a chair by the door of this house a man was sleeping.  The hoot of an owl from a near-by oak roused him.  He yawned and stretched himself, thrusting out his fat legs and extending his great arms.  Then becoming aware of the small figure which had stolen up the path as he slept and now stood before him in the uncertain light, he fell to rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his plump hands.  The pale night mist out of the silent depths of the forest had assumed shapes as strange.

“Who are you?” he demanded, and his voice rumbled thickly forth from his capacious chest.  The very sound was sleek and unctuous.

“I’m Hannibal,” said the small figure.  He was meditating flight; he glanced over his shoulder toward the woods.

“No, you ain’t.  He’s been dead a thousand years, more or less.  Try again,” recommended the man.

“I’m Hannibal Wayne Hazard,” said the boy.  The man quitted his chair.

“Well—­I am glad to know you, Hannibal Wayne Hazard.  I am Slocum Price—­Judge Slocum Price, sometime major-general of militia and ex-member of congress, to mention a few of those honors my fellow countrymen have thrust upon me.”  He made a sweeping gesture with his two hands outspread and bowed ponderously.

The boy saw a man of sixty, whose gross and battered visage told its own story.  There was a sparse white frost about his ears; and his eyes, pale blue and prominent, looked out from under beetling brows.  He wore a shabby plum-colored coat and tight, drab breeches.  About his fat neck was a black stock, with just a suggestion of soiled linen showing above it.  His figure was corpulent and unwieldy.

The man saw a boy of perhaps ten, barefoot, and clothed in homespun shirt and trousers.  On his head was a ruinous hat much too large for him, but which in some mysterious manner he contrived to keep from quite engulfing his small features, which were swollen and tear-stained.  In his right hand he carried a bundle, while his left clutched the brown barrel of a long rifle.