They twisted in and out through the laurel and rhododendrons, between bald rocks, mighty and pigmy, and over crumbling logs coated with liverwort. Through walls of tangled thorn brush; out and along paths beaten by the wild razorbacks, and down, always downward, the three followed the erratic zigzag trail of blood for four miles. Down to the very water's brink of Boon Creek, where they lost it.
They traversed both sides of the creek up and down for miles with no signs of the lost trail. Hour after hour they searched until night came upon them, and they returned home, with the uncanny feeling that the wounded revenuer was likely to rise up out of the ground, or step out of the granite heart of some boulder at any moment.
At dawn the following day, thirty armed men gathered at the cabin. Lem spread them out, beginning at the canyon of Hellsfork, and they beat the rugged country systematically, working upward. Each day at sunrise they resumed the search where they left off until the eighth day, when they left all growth and foliage behind and came high up amid the naked, forbidding peaks of the range; precincts to discourage a mountain goat, much more a wounded man. They were rewarded with no signs of the revenuer.
They disbanded, and Lem Lutts returned to the cabin, melancholy and morose. This futile hunt for his elusive arch enemy was prophetic of some strange, dawning evolution. He felt the tang of it in his blood. He saw it lettered in the patchwork of the shadows that tried to wrap their arms about him. Amid the swaying branches of the trees the sympathetic night winds lisped incoherently, and tried to tell him something. The feral night-hawks dropped their shrill cries ominously down from the sky; utterances seemingly meant for him. From down in the jungle realms of the deserted church the faint whimpering of a panther whelp floated up to his attuned ears, like the sobbing of a tired child, carrying the warning of an oracular omen he could not deny.
The tree-frogs piped the spirit of this premonition to him with a monotonous insistency that filled the boy's soul with an alien, restive turbulence not comprehensible. The katydid purled its mysterious cadence. To his keen interpretations all the subtle, nocturnal elements of nature united upon one portentous theme. A significant, adjuring symphony; the prelude of some miraculous happening that stood very close to his life; inspiring him with a wild, palpitating unrest that puzzled his reason and stirred him like the touch of an unseen hand.