HOW THE OUTLIERS CAME UP WITH THE FAR-FOLK AT A PLACE CALLED THE SMITHY, AND HERMAN CAME BACK TO RIVER WARD

Nothing in all that struggle initiated by the lifting of the King’s Desire, pleased me so much as the way the Far-Folk outstretched themselves by their own cunning. They had chewed the cud of the old grudge so long, disgorging and regorging, that life smacked no other savour for them. They made the mistake of imagining no other among their enemies. That slow treachery of Ravenutzi’s, while it burned against the honor of the Outliers, kept the habit of treacherous thinking alive among their enemies. The Far-Folk wasted themselves upon the method and left not much to reckon with beyond the fact of possession.

Let them once get their hands upon the 218King’s Desire! They asked no more than that, planned very little more. Communication with Ravenutzi was difficult. Never greater than the time of the Meet from which they hoped so much, when the thought of the Treasure was uppermost in every man’s mind. Then hope overrode precaution and drew them, when they had most need to keep in the dark, to cluster just beyond River Ward like wastrels above the water where the dead are about to rise. There, had he not had other business for his thoughts, Mancha should have discerned them. But the Hammerer’s preoccupation, though it saved them from detection by increasing the sense of safety, hurried the unearthing of the King’s Desire.

News of this move only reached the Far-Folk as they lay all together, with no preparation for flight or siege, in a shallow cañon back of River Ward, humming with excited talk, like a hive about to swarm. The mere hint of frustration fanned them into a fury, which was succeeded when the Treasure was actually in camp, by gross, babbling boastfulness and exultation. Close on this came word from Ravenutzi that he had fled the Outliers with the 219Ward, and they were to await him in a place called the Smithy.

If they wondered why he should have taken so much trouble for a girl who had already served her turn, they had either less interest in his relation to her, or trusted him more. What did concern them was that the same message told them that by this time the Outliers were in a fair way to discover the loss of the King’s Desire.

They judged they would be tracked and planned their defense in keeping with what they thought the Outliers’ probable estimate of themselves. They reasoned that the Outliers would be expecting lies in the enemy’s country. They left a boy behind them to watch. If the Outliers lost the trail he was to run and bring the Far-Folk word. If they struck the trail to the Smithy he was to turn them from it by the simple truth. There they overdid themselves. The Outliers, not yet inured to lies, believed what the boy told them.

They caught the boy—one with some spirit in him meriting a better employment—crawling through the scrub half a day beyond River Ward, and brought him before Persilope, where he scratched and cursed awhile and 220then fell sullen under their questioning. Let them kill him, he said, but he would not tell where his people were, nor how to get at them.

“Nay, we will not kill you, lad,” Noche reassured him, “we love you so much.” Here he wrapped his great arms about the boy, handfast behind his back as the captors had brought him in, and lifted him against his breast.

“So,” he laughed, “will you not tell me for love where the Far-Folk are?”

“No.” The boy’s face flushed purple, the breath came whistling through his teeth.

“One,” said Noche, and the muscles of his back began to swell.

“Two,” said Noche.

“Yes-s-ss!” sung the boy’s rattling breath.

And when Noche, who would have cracked the ribs of a grown man as well, set him down, the boy staggered and was sick, and admitted they were at the Smithy. He had been entirely within his instruction in that, but he must have seen the unwisdom of telling the truth as he had been instructed, when the Outliers set out immediately in that direction. His distress was evident and genuine, he 221moaned and whimpered, came fawning to Persilope.

“Why, what ails the boy?” said he, perplexed. “We want no more of you.”

“But, oh, I have lied to you,” whined the lad. “I have lied; you will kill me when you learn how I have lied. They are not at the Smithy.”

“Where then?”

“Oh, oh, I do not know. Over there. At Eagle Rock, perhaps. But certainly not at the Smithy.”

His anxiety undid him; Noche came close.

“Shall I say three to you, my youngling?”

The boy fell silent and shivering. All the rest of that journey Noche kept him serviceable by the mere motion of his arms.

The place called the Smithy lies in the pit of a blind cañon, all of rusty red volcanic stone. Half-cooled it seems, smudged black with smoke, encrusted with flakes of dark lichen like soot. Some Junipers grow there, wind depressed, all asquat above the rocks like dwarfed, warty things crept out of the ruins to take the sun. In the middle of the pit half a score of pines staggered together as if awry with labor at the cold forges. Here the 222Far-Folk repaired to wait the smith and gloat upon his work. Here, when the earth melted in its own shadow under a sky of dusky blueness, whitening to an unrisen moon, the Outliers found them. The Far-Folk had eaten, and sat about on the broken stones gloating. Even in repose, and from the top of the hill where the Outliers looked down at them, they had the attitudes of exultation. The King’s Desire lay uncorded in their midst, the little low fire struck a thousand bright reflections from it. Red eyes of gems winked from behind a screen of golden fret. At the head of the circle sat the chief of the Far-Folk, and the Cup of the Four Quarters was between his knees.

This Oca was a lithe man, well bronzed, of a singular, wild, fearless bearing; he had a beard of thick, wavy locks that he blew back from his lips as he talked, accommodated to the carriage of his head like sculptor work. Around his mouth there was the evidence of something half-formed, undependable, the likeness of half fabled wood-creatures. In his eyes, which were bright and roving, and on his brow, there was the witness of extraordinary intelligence. He had a laugh, short and 223bubbling, that came always at the end of his words and belied their seriousness; it was as if some sardonic half-god sat in him and laughed at his assumption of being a man. He laughed now as the Outliers looked down on him, lifting the Cup of the Four Quarters, blowing back his long lip locks to drink.

The Outliers had come, I say, to the top of the cañon at dark, for they had not been very sure of the way, and had scorned to squeeze further help from their captive. They hung there straining through the dusk to take the lay of the land and for the moment forgot the lad. He must have had some good stuff in him, for all that afternoon he had been white with high resolve, when they thought him merely frightened. The Outliers’ party halted where the coiled and undulating strata flowed down the sides of the cañon like water lines in old bas-reliefs. Under the wiry trees they made out sparkles of red and green and figures moving. Just then the boy managed, by slipping on a pebble, to bring his throat a foot from Noche’s hand and to let out a cry formless and anguished, breaking off in mid-utterance like a trumpet torn asunder. To it succeeded the sound of a limp body dropping 224among disjointed stones, the rush of the Outliers going down, and the scuttling of the Far-Folk in the blind gully like scared sheep in a runway.

It was very quickly over. The cry had done its work and the advantage of the ground was all to the Far-Folk; dark people as they were, the dark befriended them. When the Outliers loosed their slings the first sound took them into cover. There was heard the crack of the sling stones followed by sharp groans, but by the time our men got down to the twisty trees there was not a spark of the Treasure nor one of the Treasure lifters. They stumbled on some of the Far-Folk women who had lingered to wake the sleeping children, and took them, with a good part of their baggage. By the time the moon came up there was nothing to be seen of either party but one slim body of a lad, with his back broken, growing cold in a deep cairn of stones.

Persilope moved on with the slingsmen to keep the trail of the Far-Folk warm, and Mancha, who preferred the work that promised earliest news of Zirriloë, came back with the captives to River Ward.

In the early half light, as they traveled, 225they were aware of a tall woman with long hair blowing, who came and stood on a hill overlooking them for long enough to have counted all the captives. When she had told them over, she wrung her hands and bit upon them, and vanished into the morning mist. I supposed it must have been Ravenutzi’s wife. She was still looking for some clue of him and had not found it.

We moved, all of us, from Windy Covers that day to a place beyond the Ledge, but near enough to the Gap for us to fall back upon our own country if need arose. That night, before Mancha got in from the Smithy, Herman came back again. It was the pale end of night, the moon was gone ghost white, and the wind was awake that runs before the dawn. I was lying sleepless in my bed under the buckthorn when I heard the whisper of their arrival on the far side of the camp.

I had said to myself that I owed Herman no welcome. Though there was no personal tie between us, there was in our common condition of aliens among the Outliers an obligation to look out for me, which he had no right to neglect. Here was I left to he knew not what pains and inconveniences while he ran 226after this wild girl and a faithless, dishonored man. The more I considered this, the less of satisfaction it brought me. For whatever the pitiableness of the girl’s case, and I felt there might be something in that, it was no affair of Herman’s. Why should he set himself beside her and against all other women who had kept right and true, by what pains and passionate renunciations I seemed now to feel myself seized and participated. I saw myself with the others affronted by any excusing of Zirriloë. That my friend should so excuse her pointed and made personal the offense.

I was so sure of this res............