Read "Carmen's Messenger" by Harold Bindloss online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Next morning Foster got up in the dark and walked briskly down the main street to the bridge. Lights were beginning to blink in the houses he passed and there was a pungent smell of burning wood. In front, the forest rolled upwards in a blurred, dark mass, but he could not see the mountains. The air was still and felt damp upon his skin, and he knew a sudden rise of temperature accounted for the obscurity. The main thing, however, was that there was nobody to watch him, and he set off along the road he had taken on the previous night.
He had some trouble to keep the trail when he plunged in among the trees, but day had broken when he reached the clearing, and a faint gray light shone through the haze. There was no obvious reason why the stranger's disappearance at the spot should interest him, but his suspicions were quickly excited and it looked as if the fellow had tried to make his acquaintance in order to learn his business in the town. He had come early, hoping to find footprints that might give him a hint, but was disappointed. There were a number of marks, but they had lost their sharpness and he could not tell which had been made recently.