Between the morning and the dead hours of night I was awakened in the hut, feeling Evarra’s hands go over me lightly as squirrels’ as she gathered up her belongings.
“What are you doing, Evarra?”
“Making ready.”
“For what?”
“Child, the Ward is stolen and the Far-Folk have taken the King’s Desire, and you ask me that!”
“What is that sound I hear, Evarra, like a wounded creature?”
“It is the mother of the Ward.”
“It hurts to hear it; may I go to her?”
“You! What could you say to her? Besides, it is better for her to have her cry out before she comes where her man is.”
“Where is Prassade?”
198“Where we must be at mid-morning, at the Ledge.”
“And Mancha?”
“Where he should have been this month past, at River Ward. It was there the stealers came through.”
“Have you any word?”
“Before the Council parted a message came from the trackers who had found a sign. The stealers went through by Broken Head. Sleep now,” she said.
I heard the light scrape of her feet on the threshold, and I lay still at the bottom of a pit of blackness, from which at unutterable heights I could make out a point of light or two cut off at times by the indistinguishable stir of boughs.
Between the trees the lights of the Outliers illumined the space under the shut branches faintly as the lights in crypts that show where the bones of saints are laid. I lay revolving in my mind all the circumstance of my coming here and of my connection with the Ward and Ravenutzi. Suddenly there flashed forth, like a picture on a screen, the incident of that letter which I had helped Ravenutzi to make. The token he had worn so gaily and lost so 199unaccountably. It had been a true message dropped conveniently for one who waited for it, and I grew sick and hot in the dark thinking how he had used me. I must have dozed after that, for I thought the sound of crying increased outside, and it was no longer the Ward’s mother, but the tall woman of the woods who called me by my name to upbraid me. A moment later it changed to Evarra calling me awake.
As yet no beam shone or bird sang; I saw the shapes of the women blocked indistinguishably in the mouse-colored mist. I watched them, by that wild faculty of theirs for covering their traces as the fox covers its tracks, draw, as it were, the surface of the forest over all the signs of their occupancy. They strewed dry, rotting fern above the caches, leaf litter where the hearths had been. When I rose and went out to them, Evarra touched my bed with her foot once, twice, and it was no bed, but the summer drift about the roots of trees. As we went hillward silence spread behind us in the meadows and took the place with desolation.
By the ridge between Deep Fern and Deer Lake Hollow the women with young children 200turned off toward some safe, secret center, there to wait word from their men. Evarra and the more active women kept on to the Ledge. I went with them, not being wanted very much, but because in the hurry of Council no other provision had been made for me.
To understand all that went on in the next few weeks, it is necessary to be precise. Deep Fern is as far from Broken Tree as a strong man can walk in twelve or fourteen hours, walking steadily, and the Ledge is ten hours from Deep Fern. It runs, a great dyke of porphyry, with the contour of the hills, at the upper limit of tall trees and makes a boundary between Outland and the Far-Folk. Beginning and end of it I never saw, but from a place called Windy Cover to River Ward I knew it very well. In this place it passes over shallow, stony soil, in which nothing grows more than knee height, except on the lee side of one strong hill where a triangular space of lilac and toyon reaches quite up to the rocky wall. The chaparral is tall enough for a man or a deer to walk in it upright. Certain small winds forever straying and whirling here, ruffling the tops of the scrub and stirring the branches, make it possible for such a passage 201to take place unobserved. The stir of a man moving through it, indistinguishable from the running movements of the wind, gives the place its name of Windy Covers.
From here the Ledge goes East, high and impassable, following the hills until it reaches the gap where the river comes through. There it leaves off for a crow’s flight, and the river continues that boundary until it touches the Ledge again. The whole of this space being thickly wooded and the river running shallowly at seasons, it was here the Far-Folk trespassed most. Here past the end of the Dyke the filchers of the King’s Desire had come. The whole region was known as River Ward, and Mancha kept watch over it. Beyond its second point of contact with the dyke, called Broken Head, the Ledge went on south a very great distance. I never heard how far, though from something that I heard at Windy Covers I gathered that the Outliers possessed all the district south as far as the Sur. Just beyond Broken Head the river widens and makes a turn where there is easy passing, called from the sound of it going over the smooth stones, Singing Ford. All 202the other places I have named lay north of the river between it and the Ledge.
We came to Windy Covers a little after midday. I should have said, looking up its green steep, level grown as a mown field, that all the Outliers were there before us. The tops of the scrub were all ashake; the lilacs tossed, the buckthorn turned and whitened. Lines of wavering showed in it like the stir of a meadow when rabbits run in the grass. But it turned out to be only the wind walking for we were hours ahead of the men.
“Ah, I told you it was good cover,” said Evarra, as we came in by the green tunnels that the deer had made.
I had gathered from the talk of the women that we were to lie there, guarding the pass, and keeping out of River Ward. Mancha was occupying that section now, hoping not to excite the Far-Folk by too active pursuit. It was not known yet if the lifters of the Treasure had passed beyond River Ward or if Ravenutzi had joined them, if indeed he might not yet be on our side the Ledge with the Ward. There were some other points in this connection on which I wished to satisfy myself. So when I saw Lianth mousing along 203under the wall, I crept after him, unsuspected. We came into a little bay of bitten scrub and a well-trodden track that led up along the stony, broken back of the Ledge. This way the bucks had gone when at the end of the mating season they ranged afar and fed on the high ridges. This way they came down to seek the does, and along this trail I saw Lianth pawing breathlessly, nose to the thick mosses like a snuffling hound.
“They must have come this way,” he said.
“Yes,” I assented, thinking of the deer.
“If they have crossed, there should be some trace of them. They must have come in the night and could not have gone so carefully.” He scrutinized little heaps of leaf litter in the crevices, and squinted along the ground. “And the trackers have not been here either. They cannot have crossed at all.”
All at once I understood that he was talking about Ravenutzi and the Ward.
“There is no other way,” he said, “no other way possible for—a girl.”
“Lianth, where is Herman?”
He left off pawing over the trail and walked on toward the rim of the Ledge.
“Gone after her.”
204“Zirrilëe?”
He nodded.
“But why?”
“Mancha sent him.”
“Why should he take so much trouble? She went where she chose. You heard what the keeper said?”
“Ah!” he cried woundedly, “you women are all against her!”
We had reached the top of the Ledge overlooking the Far-Folk country. It was all rounded, grassy hills, stony, full of shallow hollows, with occasional depressed trees, lying in the thin, airy shadows that fall so singularly in high places. It was very still, two or three crows flying over, and far up under the blue a buzzard sailing.
“It’s no use looking out for them,” objected Lianth. “They’ll not show themselves while we are here.”
“Do you think they know?”
“Huh! Do rabbits know when coyotes hunt? If they know about the King’s Desire what wouldn’t they know?”
He was sitting on a heap of stones picking the moss out of the crannies and pitching it down below. His throat and chin were 205strained and tight as though no songs could come that way again.
“When I think of her hands,” he said, “and the parting of her hair, as white as a dove’s egg ... if she loved anybody she wouldn’t have thought of anything else.”
“Evidently she didn’t,” I insisted cruelly. “But why do you care so much? Even if she hadn’t run away with Ravenutzi it wouldn’t have been you she would have married, it would have been Mancha.”
To look at the boy you would have said his songs were not all dead, one of them rose and struggled to go the accustomed way, and it was a song of boy’s love and wounded trust. He bit it back at last.
“Mancha was the only one good enough for her,” he choked. He was done with the moss now, and was aiming small stones carefully at empty space. “I would have wanted her to have the best.”
“At any rate she took what she wanted.”
He stood up, flushed and tormented.
“You’re just down on her because Herman is in love with her,” he said.
“What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know.” He scuffed the moss with 206his foot and added, “You can always tell if you’re that way yourself. I don’t want to talk about it any more,” walking away from me.
Presently he came back stiffly.
“You must come with me,” he said; “you can’t stay here. I was told to look after you.”
“What time did Herman go?” I asked as we went down together.
“Just after Council. Mancha wanted to go, but they said his place was at River Ward. If he had been there all this time the Far-Folk mightn’t have got through. They let Herman do what he liked, because if it hadn’t been for him they wouldn’t have found out about the stealing so soon. And look here”—he showed me a spray of toyon berries—“I went and found this after the trackers had gone. I felt around in the dark and found it. It was the last thing she touched. It was only half broken off. She hadn’t expected to go away; she was surprised and she left it half broken off.” He put it up in his tunic again. “I don’t know why she went away with Ravenutzi, but I know she neve............