When I came to grassy plots I lay down and bathed my
face in the cold dew, and also bared my arms and moistened them in the
cool, damp grass.
When the sun came up over the eastern tree-tops I found that I was about
ten miles from Rushville. After stumbling on for some time longer I found
my way to Henry Lord's, a farmer with whom I was acquainted. He gave me a
room in which I lay hidden from the officers for two days and nights. From
this place I went to my father's, and although the officers came there two
or three times, I escaped arrest. It is impossible to give the reader the
faintest idea of my condition. Without money, clothes, or friends, an
outcast, hunted like a wild beast, I had only one thing left--my horrible
appetite, at all times fierce and now maddening in the extreme. My hands
trembled, my face was bloated, and my eyes were bloodshot. I had almost
ceased to look like a human. Hope had flown from me, and I was in complete
despair. I moved about over my father's farm like one walking in sleep, the
veriest wretch on the face of the earth. My real condition not unfrequently
pressed upon me until, in an agony of desperation, I would put my swollen
hands over my worse than bloated face and groan aloud, while tears scalding
hot streamed down over my fingers and arms.
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