576
WILLIAM STYRON
lenient master than Barnett had been. He understood only that he had
been separated from all the family he had ever had and from the
only home he had ever known. After a week at Travis's his misery and
homesickness and his general sense of loss became insupportable. And
so one summer night he decided to light out, heading for that Quaker
church two hundred miles away in Maryland which Hannibal had
told him about many months before. At first it was
all
very much
a kind of lark, for stealing away from Travis was a simple matter. He
had only to tiptoe out of the shed in which he was kept after Travis
had gone to sleep, and with a flour sack containing some bacon and
corn meal, a jackknife, and flint for starting fires, all stolen, the entire
parcel slung over his shoulder on a stick, make his way into the woods.
It was easy as it could be. The woods were quiet. There he paused for
an hour or so, waiting to see
if
by any chance Travis might discover
his absence and raise an alarm, but no sound came from the house.
He crept out along the edge of the trees, took to the road north and
sauntered along in high spirits beneath a golden moon. The weather
was balmy, he made excellent time, and the only eventful moment of
that first night came when a dog ran out from a farmhouse, furiously
barking, and snapped at his heels. This proved Hannibal correct in
his advice about dogs, and caused Hark to resolve that in the future
he would give
all
dwellings wide berth, even if it meant losing hours
by moving to the woods. He met no one on the road and as the agree–
able night passed he began to feel a tingling sense of jubilation: run–
ning away seemed to be no great undertaking after all. When dawn
came he knew he had made good progress-though how far he had
traveled he could not tell, lacking any notion of the size of a rniIe–
and with the sound of roosters crowing in some distant barnyard he
fell asleep on the ground in a stand of beech trees, well away from
the road.
Just before noon he was aroused by the sound of dogs barking
to the south, a quavering chorus of yelps and frantic howls which
made him sit up in terror. Surely they were after him! His first im–
pulse was to climb a tree but he quickly lost heart for this endeavor
because of his terror of heights. Instead he crept into a blackberry
thicket and peeked out at the road. Two slobbering bloodhounds fol–
lowed by four men on horseback came out of the distance in a cloud
of dust, the men's faces each set in a blue-eyed, grim, avenging look
