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I shall now draw this painful narrative to a close, dismissing with merely a few lines those facts that in a garbled form have already reached the public eye through the medium of a ribald and disrespectful press how my youthful companions, returning betimes to our camping place and finding me gone, and finding also abundant signs of a desperate struggle, hastened straightway to return home by the first train to spread the tidings that I had been kidnapped; how search was at once instituted; how, late that same evening, after running down various vain clues, my superior, the Reverend Doctor Tubley, arrived at Hatchersville aboard a special train, accompanied by a volunteer posse of his parishioners and other citizens and rescued me, semi-delirious and still fettered, as my captors were on the point of removing me, a close prisoner, to the Branch State Asylum for the Insane at Pottsburg, twenty miles distant, in the deluded expectation of securing a reward for my apprehension; of how explanations were vouchsafed, showing that while I, with utter justification, had regarded them as lunatics, they, in their ignorance and folly, had, on the other hand, regarded me as being mentally afflicted; and how finally, being removed by careful hands to my place of residence, I remained a constant invalid, in great mental and bodily distress, for a period of above a fortnight.
With a sinking of the heart I recalled having heard that the Branch State Asylum for the Insane was situate but a few short miles distant from Hatchersville! It may have been that my cheeks paled, and when I spoke my voice perchance quivered; but I trust that in all other respects my demeanour in that trying moment was calm, cool and collected.
As he sat demurely behind me I observed him in the act of imitating my gestures of reproof to his less decorous comrades a manifestation of the emulative spirit which gratified me no little. I own that I was much rejoiced to hear the verbal announcement of the conductor's assistant known, I believe, as the brakeman that Hatchersville would be the next stopping place.
This done and the members being warned to have their uniforms speedily ready, I announced that on the following Thursday we should embark on our first invasion of the forest primeval, going for a camping expedition of three days to the shores of Hatcher's Lake, a body of water situate, as I had previously ascertained, a distance of forty miles by rail from the city and four miles more from the station at Hatchersville, a small village.
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