The Wild Olive

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The Wild Olive

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Title: The Wild Olive
Author: Basil King
Release Date: August 18, 2004 [EBook #13212]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OLIVE ***

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[Illustration: "There are a hundred men beating the mountain to find
you"]

The Wild Olive
A Novel
By the author of The Inner Shrine
Illustrated by Lucius Hitchcock
New York Grosset & Dunlap Publishers

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers All Rights Reserved
Published May, 1910 Printed in the United States of America


Part I
Ford

I

Finding himself in the level wood-road, whose open aisle drew a long,
straight streak across the sky, still luminous with the late-lingering
Adirondack twilight, the tall young fugitive, hatless, coatless, and
barefooted, paused a minute for reflection. As he paused, he listened;
but all distinctiveness of sound was lost in the play of the wind, up hill
and down dale, through chasm and over crag, in those uncounted
leagues of forest. It was only a summer wind, soft and from the south;

but its murmur had the sweep of the eternal breath, while, when it
waxed in power, it rose like the swell of some great cosmic organ.
Through the pines and in the underbrush it whispered and crackled and
crashed, with a variety of effect strangely bewildering to the young
man's city-nurtured senses. There were minutes when he felt that not
only the four country constables whom he had escaped were about to
burst upon him, but that weird armies of gnomes were ready to trample
him down.
Out of the confusion of wood-noises, in which his unpractised ear
could distinguish nothing, he waited for a repetition of the shots which
a few hours ago had been the protest of his guards; but, none coming,
he sped on again. He weighed the danger of running in the open against
the opportunities for speed, and decided in favor of the latter. Hitherto,
in accordance with a woodcraft invented to meet the emergency, and
entirely his own, he had avoided anything in the nature of a road or a
pathway, in order to take advantage of the tracklessness which formed
his obvious protection; but now he judged the moment come for putting
actual space between his pursuers and himself. How near, or how far
behind him, they might be he could not guess. If he had covered ground,
they would have covered it too, since they were men born to the
mountains, while he had been bred in towns. His hope lay in the
possibility that in this wilderness he might be lost to their ken, as a
mote is lost in the air--though he built something on the chance that, in
sympathy with the feeling in his favor pervading the simpler population
of the region, they had given negative connivance to his escape. These
thoughts, far from stimulating a false confidence, urged him to greater
speed.
And yet, even as he fled, he had a consciousness of abandoning
something--perhaps of deserting something--which brought a strain of
regret into this minute of desperate excitement. Without having had
time to count the cost or reckon the result, he felt he was giving up the
fight. He, or his counsel for him, had contested the ground with all the
resourceful ingenuity known to the American legal practitioner. He was
told that, in spite of the seeming finality of what had happened that
morning, there were still loopholes through which the defence might be

carried on. In the space of a few hours Fate had offered him the choice
between two courses, neither of them fertile in promises of success.
The one was long and tedious, with a possibility of ultimate
justification; the other short and speedy, with the accepted imputation
of guilt. He had chosen the latter--instinctively and on the spur of the
moment; and while he might have repeated at leisure the decision he
had made in haste, he knew even now that he was leaving the ways and
means of proving his innocence behind him. The perception came, not
as the result of a process of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected
sensation.
He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than
mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually