How Herman injected into the hot plans of Mancha this cold doubt I do not know. If he accepted it as a check to his enterprise there was no visible abatement of its urgency. He was forever and fatiguingly busy; crossing over Singing Ford and returning between two days. Passing beyond Moon Crest he visited Alderhold and Bent Bow, fetching a circle almost to Broken Tree to make adherents. He was still and hungry as to his inner want, but outwardly as noisy as a bear, rapping the trunks of hollow trees or prodding the soft earth with his hammer. If in the wood at Deep Fern or Deer Lake Hollow he met with his young men, he passed them without greeting. It is doubtful if he saw them. Plainly the man was ravined with desire.

178All this time he gave no trouble to the Ward or her keepers. When she went among the young fern, between the budding willows, he did not seek her, never talked of himself in her company. It was as if the eye of his mind, so fixed upon the Mate, passed over the Maid she was. Otherwise I do not know how he could have withstood her, for she went flushed and glorious. Trastevera, I know, had expected tears and pining. Watching, she was relieved to find the girl still sustained by ecstasy, grew more at ease and trusted Ravenutzi.

For the rest of the Outliers the hesitation of Herman’s enterprise on the probable unworth of the jewels proved no disappointment. It was, in fact, a means of hurrying the movement for removing it from its present cache. They were curious to discover if the Treasure really had such an intrinsic value as Herman had taken for granted. Even though it proved of no value to the House-Folk, it was something the Far-Folk wanted very much. The keeping of it provided an occupation, and the promised unearthing an excitement for which their long truce with the Far-Folk gave them an appetite. In any case it must come up and 179be hidden again, or they must administer the Cup to Daria a second time. This involved a wrenching of their sympathies they were unwilling to endure, even if it lay in justice to twice enforce her. They were the readier for the enterprise since it appeared not necessarily to involve the acceptance of Herman’s idea.

Prassade and Persilope then, with Mancha and Herman, of course, two of the keepers—the same who had buried it—and several strong men beside, set out for the cache of the King’s Desire. They went north and seaward by a shorter route than the Ward had taken, since they had not the same need of doubling for concealment. They passed the upper limit of redwoods and came to a region of thin, spiked spruce and pines, knuckly promontories encrusted with lichen sticking out of a thin, whitish soil. By afternoon they struck into a gully where an opaque stream purled in shallow basins and spilled in thin cascades to gravely levels. Here they began to take note of landmarks and measure distances. First there was a sheer jut of country rock, stained black by the dribble of a spring. Below it a half moon of pond as green as malachite. Directly up from that, on the shoulder of a stony 180hill, five pines, slender and virginal, stood circlewise, bent somehow by weather stress to the postures of dancing. They balanced in the wind and touched the tips of their stretched, maiden boughs.

From here, ascending, the stream spindled to a thread, and led the eye under the combe of the ridge to a high round boulder, gripped mid-long of its fall by the curled roots of a pine. Under the boulder was the cache of the King’s Desire.

I asked Herman afterward how soon the intimation of what they were to find there began to reach them, and he said, to himself not at all. He remembered Prassade asking of Noche, if this was the trail they had taken with the Ward, and the old man’s quick, sidewise glance that questioned why he asked. He remembered as they came by the green water, one of the keepers stooping to examine something, and Noche beginning to twitch and bristle like a dog striking an unwelcome trail. They came to the boulder. Signs of the recent rains were all about, the half-uprooted pine that braced it showed a slight but fresh abrasion of the bark. The two keepers had their heads together, whispering apart.

181They would not believe it! Even when the first scraping of the wooden shovels showed the soil loose and yielding, and below the percolating dampness of the rains they found filling of fresh, dry gravel, they would not believe the cache had been rifled.

The jewels were in a great chest, red and rotten, corded up with skins, half a man’s length under ground. So said Noche, who had buried them. They dug; they were waist deep, they were up to their armpits; they dug steadily.

Suddenly there was a sound of the shovels striking solid. They exclaimed with relief. Noche was old, and in ten years had forgotten. Then the diggers cleared the ground and showed the solid country rock.

Whoever had lifted the Treasure had done it most cleverly. Every particle of the soil removed had been taken out on skins and put back again with filling brought ready for the purpose, so that no sinking of the surface should betray the theft. It had been done recently, between the rains. On the white, abraided bark of the pine there were splatterings of the rapid downpour of the last heavy shower.

182Let but a few weeks of stormy weather go over and it would have been impossible to say that the place had been visited.

The Outliers might have gone on guarding an empty cache for generations. They shuddered back from such a possibility like men suddenly upon a brink. They were, in fact, so shocked and astounded by the theft that their faculties were all abroad. They dug wide and furiously, Noche pawing over every crumbling clod with a whimpering sound like a hound at a fox’s earth.

High up as the place was, higher ridges made a pit of it which now, as the light receded, they flung full of blackness. On the combe above, the young pines were black against pale twilight, dancing and deriding.

Night-eyed as the Outliers were, they dared not risk the loss of the faintest clue by trampling heedlessly. The theft and the cunning manner of it pointed to one thing—the Far-Folk. On that point they were sure; and on one other.

The King’s Desire was gone, it should come back again. They swore it. One of them lifted up his hand to take the oath, as the custom 183was, by the honor of the Maiden Ward.

“Stop!” said Prassade.

I do not know what things leaped together in the man’s mind, what circumstance but half observed, what weakness of his blood yet unconfessed, what scrupulosity of honor. “Stop!” he said, and the swearer’s hand slacked limply. Mancha propped it up fiercely with his own.

“By the honor of the Maiden Ward,” he swore, “it comes back again.”

Prassade gurgled in his throat. In the gray light as they looked at each other, it grew upon them that the loss of the Treasure meant betrayal. Daria, Zirriloë, the four keepers, to whom should they apportion dishonor? From that time, said Herman, no man looked full at his neighbor or spoke freely what he thought until they came to Deep Fern.

In the meantime it had occurred to me that I was not seeing as much of Ravenutzi as was implied in my promise to Trastevera. Besides, I thought it might be interesting to know what he thought of the redisposal of the King’s Treasure. I had followed the use of the Outliers up to this time in not speaking of it to him.

184I was sitting between the roots of a redwood steeped in the warm fragrance and languor of a pine forest in the spring, when this notion occurred to me. The force with which this idea caught me might have arisen from Trastevera’s wishing it at that moment, or Ravenutzi’s being engaged on some business that made my presence advisable. Accordingly I looked for the smith in the accustomed places, where, in the fulfillment of his hostage, he made a point of being unobtrusively and contentedly about. He could be found oftenest with Noche, the only one of the men who afforded him an unaffronting companionship. But this morning I could not find him in the Fern, nor at his smithy under the fall, nor with the fishers at the creek. It was quite by accident that I came upon him some hours later sitting on a stump in an artificial clearing not much frequented by the Outliers, since it had been a hunters’ camp and had the man taint about it. As he sat turning over some small matters in his hand, his brow knitting and unknitting, the whole man seemed to bristle with some evil, anxious intent. If there had been flames jutting from him, green spitting flames from eye and brow, they could not 185have given to him an aspect more sinister and burning. The mobile tip of his nose twitched slightly, the full, gracile lips were drawn back, bracketed by deep, unmirthful lines. The whole personality of the man pulsed and wavered with the fury of his cogitations, which, when he looked up and saw me, he gathered up with a gesture and disposed of like a snake swallowing its skin.

From the moment that his eyes lighted on mine his look neither flinched nor faltered, but all the evil preoccupation of him seemed to retreat and withdraw under their velvet. His mood yielded, as it seemed to me he always did yield, gracefully to my understanding and the security of sympathy. He had been busy as I came up, with some bits of leaves and blossoms and sticks, all of special significance, by which the Outliers could communicate as well as by letter. He was tying them in a bundle, which, as soon as he saw me, he began to untie and scatter as though there had been no object in it but mere employment.

Seeing him set his foot on some shredded petals of a sentimental significance, I thought he might have been composing a message to 186some woman of his own, to her who had come to me at Leaping Water perhaps, and destroyed it as one tears verses written in secret. I was quite willing to help him from the embarrassment of being caught at such an occupation by falling in with his first suggestion.

“Come,” he said, making room on the stump beside him, “it is a good day for teaching you to be completely the Outlier that I believe you are at heart.”

He lifted a heap of twigs and flowers, chose a spray of laurel and berries of toyon, with two small sticks, one of which was carefully measured three-fourths of the length of the other.

“Now what does this say?”

“The toyon means courage, but taken with the laurel probably means a place where they grow together,” I answered, proud of knowing so much; “two things of the same kind mean time—two days—no, one day and three-quarters.”

“Say to-morrow at mid-afternoon.” Then he considered, and added a small feather. “And this?”

I was doubtful.

“Speed,” I hazarded.

187He gave the two low, warning notes of the quail, and I clapped my hands, recognizing it as a quail’s feather.