the handsomest berries, some thirty paces from them, but never out of
sight. They could see her dress among the leaves. Yes, they were all
sure of that. He could not say how long it was before it occurred to
them as strange that she should stand there so long in the toyon. Nor
how long after that it dawned upon them that it was not she but her
dress which they looked at hanging there in the chaparral, stirred by
the wind. One of the women went to look, and found the Ward’s outer
garment stuck shoulder high among the branches. They thought it a prank
at first, bent back the boughs, peering and calling. Beyond the close
outer wall of foliage the thicket was open enough for careful passage.
They pushed into the thickest stems, suspecting her in ambush. One of
the women some paces ahead, beginning to be annoyed, searching rapidly,
spied something slipping from hollow shade to shade. She made an
exclamation of discovery which changed to fright as a man shot out from
the laurels in front of her and disappeared. They had all seen him
crouching and running under the low branches up the slope.
They had spent little time after that looking about them. It was already
dusk in the chaparral. The speaker had left the women behind, and come
on rapidly to send some one younger on the darkling trail. He turned
toward the girl’s father as he spoke, as being naturally the most
interested. I could see Prassade’s face set and harden with the
narrative, the line of his mouth thinning. Now it widened to let out two
sharp questions.
“Did you see any sign of struggle or capture?”
“Not a leaf disturbed, not a twig broken, but indeed we went only a
little way——”
“What sort of a man was it?”
“He was dressed as an Outlier.”
“Ah!” The trap of Prassade’s lips went shut again, he had got what he
waited for.
“But you did not think him one?” It was Persilope took up the question.
“It was very dark under the laurels; he ran fast.”
“Was he Far-Folk?”
“So the woman thought.”
I could see in the dusk the lift of Prassade’s shoulders, and the slight
inclination of his palms outward. He had had all that day and the night
for wondering what his daughter’s part in the theft of the treasure
might have been. Perhaps—who knew?—some unadmitted fact had gone to the
shaping of his conclusion. He turned to Persilope, and his voice cracked
with hardness.
“It seems to me,” he said, “we have affairs more important than the
flight of a dishonored girl.”
“No, by the Friend!” cried a man, one of those who had gone with the
Treasure party. “It seems to me that it is all one affair, and we shall
find the girl when we find the King’s Desire. They have gone together.”
At this, which was the first announcement of the loss so plainly
intimated by the demeanor of the party, there ran a sound of unbelief
and bewilderment around the camp.
“Gone!” they cried, and “Gone! The King’s Treasure!” in every accent of
incredulity and surprise.
“Ay, gone,” said Prassade, “seized, stolen away,” unconsciously
repeating the words of the keeper, “gone with my honor and the faith of
the Outliers.”
While the keeper told his story the listeners, in the manner of crowds,
surged forward, closing between him and the dispirited Treasure party.
At Prassade’s admission of his dishonor, they were disrupted suddenly by
sharp, explosive sounds which I knew for the rapping of Mancha’s hammer.
At the instant of the keeper’s announcement I had seen him rise and gird
himself, beginning to look about like a man missing some necessary
thing, too perturbed to recall just what he wanted. One of his young men
slipped his hammer into his hand, and at the feel of its familiar handle
a little of the strained look left his face. Then the crowd swallowed
him in its eagerness to hear what Prassade and the keeper said.
Now as the circle broke back from him and the sound of his whirling
hammer, I saw the pale blotch of his face and hair distinct in the
twilight.
“Oh, Persilope,” he said, “take what measures you will for the recovery
of the King’s Desire, but this is my business. Here should be no talk of
honor or dishonor, but simple outrage. A man of the Far-Folk has crossed
into our country and stolen the Maiden Ward. Let no man put any other
name to it until I have brought her back again. But first bring me the
smith. Before I go I would ask of him how it is, while the hostage
stands, men of his breed have trespassed on my borders. Where is
Ravenutzi?”
The crowd turned upon itself. They had a system, though I could never
understand it, by which they could locate and account for the tribesmen
when called upon. Now on Mancha’s asking, the rustle and movement began,
hesitated, and grew rapidly into a deep excited hum of resentment as the
word passed from group to group that Ravenutzi was not among them.
X
THE LEDGE
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?”
“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 unaccountably. 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 turned 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 to 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 the 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 under 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.”
“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 strained 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 his 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 never told him where the Treasure
was.”
He was so certain of that, I had no heart to trouble him with doubts. As
we came down the trail we saw the top of Windy Covers all alive, rippled
and streaked with motion.
“Some one is coming,” Lianth volunteered.
“It looked just like that this morning. How can you tell?”
“Oh, I can’t tell that. I knew how just before you asked me. The way I
know Zirriloë didn’t tell Ravenutzi about the King’s Desire; I just
know.”
It was, in fact, some of the Outliers who had not been at Deep Fern,
drawn from their own places by that mysterious capacity of evil news to
spread. They came hurrying all that day and the next. The Covers were
peopled thick as a rabbit warren. Coveys of quail whirred up from it
with a sharp explosive sound and broke toward the wooded land. Except
for that, and the fact that the quail did not come back again, there was
no sign. Men sat close in the tunnels, and it was dreadful to see the
working in them of their resentment of betrayal. So much the worse
because they knew it had been half invited. They had accepted a hostage
of the Far-Folk, who never spoke straight nor did truly. What wonder,
then, if he had done after his kind? They knew—at this point resentment
rose to its burningest—they had always known, and knowing, could not
have done otherwise. Ravenutzi came under honorable conditions, and they
had served him honorably, being so much the debtor to their own natures.
They were not only sick to be dishonored, they sickened of dishonor. As
they sat in the green glooms of Windy Covers their bodies heaved and
flushed, eyes reddened, hands wrenching at invisible things. Now and
then, at the mention of a name or a circumstance, some quick, explosive
breath would struggle with a curse; the gorge of the spirit rose.
Never among the Outliers had I found myself so unfriended. I felt myself
burned upon by their rages, but they cared nothing for my burning. To
have harped upon my own resentment was to advertise myself a witness of
their betrayal. I judged best to be as little in evidence as was
compatible without making myself a target for the Far-Folk. I found
myself as lonely as could well be expected.
Late of the second day I went down to the edge of the chaparral where
the trees began to invade it, standing apart and singly, and the
chaparral had made itself small to run under the trees. I found an
island of dry litter under a pine, and drew myself up in it, out of the
pervading bitterness and betrayal, flooding so fiercely under Windy
Covers.
It was incredibly still here; neither bird hopped nor insect hummed. The
shadows shook in the wind. I sat with my head against the pine and my
eyes closed. By degrees I thought the wind increased and drew into a
long whisper which was my name. This fancy comforted me with the notion
that whoever abandoned me, the wood was still my own. I heard it several
times before a crackling in the bushes aroused me. I turned to observe
another woman struggling anear through the thick stems of manzanita. As
she crept and wormed toward me she drew on to her knees in the open
space under the tent of the pine. Then I saw that she was the tall woman
who had loved Ravenutzi. I saw more than that; she had come to me
through great difficulty and by hard ways, her dress was torn, her hands
scratched and bleeding, her hair, which was bound under a leathern
snood, disheveled. But whatever her difficulties, they had not marred
her so much as the passions that wasted her from within. She was more
beautiful; the long, flushed throat, the red, scorning lip, the eyes
darkened and hollow. But she was so plainly gnawed upon by grief that as
we knelt there, I half risen on my knees and she on hers confronting me,
I could feel nothing but pity.
“You!” I whispered dryly.
“Speak low,” she said, though indeed we had done nothing else, so did
the stillness of the place weigh upon us. We were completely isolated in
a ring of shadow, the chaparral coming up to the outer boughs of the
pine, and the fan-spread branches meeting it a foot above our heads.
“I have waited for you all day,” she whispered. “Tell me, have you found
him? Where has he taken her?”
“I do not know. We have no trace of them.”
“But which way did they go? From what point did they leave the Meet?
Something—surely you know something?” She clasped her cut palms
together, and I saw a slight flinching at the pain they gave her. She
cast it off impatiently as though it were an interruption to her
understanding.
“Tell me first what you are to him, that you should ask?”
“His wife!”
“You—so young——”
I had an instant vision of Ravenutzi’s white hair, and then as I had
first seen him washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay. At the
recollection, and perhaps a slight flicker of amusement in her face, the
two things leaped together in my mind.
“Was that also a pretence?”
“There are herbs which will bleach the color from the hair and draw the
skin in wrinkles,” she said. “He had more years than I, but we were
young.”
“And the hostage, too, was it all a pretence from the beginning?”
“What else?” impatiently. “The King’s Desire was ours, and we schemed to
get it back as we had first won it. I was as willing as the rest when we
began. If I was not to see him again for three years, that was my part
of the service, and I was proud to pay it. But I never thought of this.
Oh no, never this!”
She crept up to me and eased the strained position of her limbs.
“I will tell you everything,” she moaned, “if you will only answer me.
Ravenutzi was to make friends with the Ward, and seduce the secret from
her. We were to lift the King’s Desire as soon as known, and nothing was
to be said or hinted until the hostage was over. Then if they discovered
the loss, who could be blamed for it? He was to stay the full time of
the hostage, for if he came away violently, they would suspect, and go
and look to see if their Treasure had been moved. I knew, or thought I
knew, that if he got anything from the Ward she would have to love him.
I thought he could manage it. He is very wise in women. Even you——”
I checked her there; it was evident the Far-Folk were acquainted with
everything that went on at Deep Fern, but I was not going to discuss my
part of it with Ravenutzi’s wife.
“You had never heard, then,” I broke in upon her, “that the Outliers
chose their most beautiful young woman to be the Ward?”
“Oh, I had heard.”
She put up her hands to her face in some quick, indefinable shame. I
suppose Ravenutzi had contrived to keep her convinced of the supremacy
of her own loveliness.
“When the Treasure was safe in our hands,” she said, “then we heard that
the House-Folk had persuaded them to show the King’s Desire and it was
certain that the lifting of the Treasure would be discovered. We did not
think it would be so soon, but we sent to bring Ravenutzi away. We were
sure he would be killed when the Treasure party returned. While the
Far-Folk waited, word came that Ravenutzi had gone to make the Ward safe
in some secret place and would join us shortly. That was all. No word to
me——” Anger swallowed up her speech.
I tried to soothe her.
“It was the least he could do if she had told him. The Outliers would
have killed her had they found her out.”
“What matter to him if they had? We have killed Outliers before now when
it was a question of the King’s Desire. Why should he be so careful of
her, unless—unless he loves her?”
In the anguish of that conviction she struck with her wounded palm
against the tree, and sinking her head upon the arm that Ravenutzi had
rested on, with what bliss it gave her the keener anguish to remember,
set her teeth in the bared, tender flesh. I let her be, writhing like a
wounded snake, for a time. Then, as the best cure, I began to tell her
with particularity all I could recall of the flight of the smith and the
Ward from Deep Fern.
She questioned as she listened; would have me be precise.
She had never been any nearer to Deep Fern than the place where I had
found her the second day of the Meet. Could she reach it easiest from
here by way of Leaping Water or otherwise? Just how far was the Laurel
Bank from the long meadow, and how could one get at it? I could see the
purpose grow in her to strike that trail and follow it to whatever end.
She listened and hardened.
“Tell me well how she looks,” she said, “so that if I find this flagrant
girl I may not mistake her,” and I saw her blench as I named the points
of the Ward’s beauty. She jerked and quivered. Little sentences escaped
from her like phrases of a delirium, of the utterance of which I think
she was unconscious.
“Little fair hands,” she said, “a trivial heart ... hair of two
colors ... a snare, a snare ... a crumpled lip goes with a false
tongue ...” Her jealousy kept pace. “Kill her, would they?... Let
them ... does he think to keep her who could not keep her word? Does he
lie safely with this false Ward while his people wait for him at——”
“Stop!” I said. “I have told you all that concerns you personally, as
one woman to another. But I advise you, I am on the side of the
Outliers, if you say anything of value to them I shall not keep it.”
She bit her lip.
“What do I know of what the people do in my absence, or where they
foregather? It is of him I think; does he imagine me waiting in my house
like a faithful wife——”
She threw out her arms, rocking on her knees.
... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...”
I do not know whether she uttered these words in the delirium of her
jealousy, or if something in the anguished gesture sent the refrain of
Ravenutzi’s song sounding through and through me. I heard it shaken like
an organ somewhere above the sound of tears.
... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...”
She stood up as well as she could under the bent pine, to draw her dress
into order, and asked me who had gone on the trail of Ravenutzi. I named
all the men, and then Herman.