The Fugitive

This psychological novel, published in 1938, details the experience of a killer on the run through rural Vermont.  The central character is an orphan farmhand. His employer, James Stark, makes an agreement with him to give him $600 at the end of three years but tries during those years to get the farmhand to leave and thus avoid having to pay. Nearing the end of the contract, at the age of 18, things come to a head and he kills Stark. He flees to the hills and is pursued by the local farmers.

The author, Richard Warren Hatch (born 18 April 1898), grew up in Massachusetts. His first novel was published in 1929 and, like this novel, featured a young farmhand. Writing under the pseudonym of Clare Meredith, most of his subsequent novels were set in rural Vermont and were psychological in their focus. He also wrote several works of fiction for children.

The author describes the psychological endurance that enables the fugitive to persevere in spite of physical weakness:
“Swinging along, fear-driven so that he had the preternatural strength of the sick, the lost and the demented, there gradually awoke in him the sense of his own prowess. He was aware that he went on beyond the limits of his own strength, that he did the impossible. He was aware that his endurance was too great for him. It was an overwhelming thought.”
In the same way soldiers were mentally driven on to overcome weakness of fatigue and injury.