Then, more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the steaming underbrush.

Here he lay still until the clatter of harness and the sound of voices faded in the distance.

Had he been followed, it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any semblance to a known form or figure.

A hideous, reddish mask of dust and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated in his trailing sleeves.

And when he rose, staggering like a drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments clung to the impeding branches.