"You are very kind, sir." And Reuben thought in a continuing astonishment: As a matter of fact, he is.... He wished Rob Grimes would set a stronger pace, but his best intelligence told him that the old man's sturdy plodding was actually not slow, considering the darkness, the need for sheltering the lantern and sending its light from side to side so that they might watch both the right and the left of the road. Maybe they were lost, the three of them, and always had been lost, lost but following some difficult thread of purpose in this windy dark. In a kindlier night they could have found the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. In a kindlier night there would have been no cause to fear, as in this wilderness Reuben knew he was afraid.
"In my own life," said Hibbs, "I have not seen much of violence. I cannot pretend to know how it was for you three years ago, except I know it to be a thing beyond words of comfort. Nevertheless allow me to say, Reuben, that your life, yours and Benjamin's, is yet at the spring."
Rob Grimes called: "Something ahead! I heard——"
The noise floated to them faintly, puzzling in the wind, a hallooing with an insane note of cheerfulness. Reuben felt a scattering coldness across his cheek—rain, or sea-scud torn by the east wind from the surface of Gallows Bay. Grimes mumbled: "Can't hear it now——"
"Hush!" said Reuben savagely. Then: "It's to the left."
"You mean the marshes, boy?"
"Yes. Give me the light, old man!" Grimes yielded it without a murmur, and Reuben ran, unthinking, sure-footed, avoiding the hummocks and the marshy hollows, shouting: "Where are you? Where are you?" Then he could see his brother fifty feet away, upright in grotesque dignity on a small sodden peninsula of land not much broader than the spread of his feet. Between him and Reuben was a muttering of wind-tormented marsh water, and a smooth patch of featureless gray unaffected by the wind. Ben took a wavering step. "Don't move, you damn fool! Look down!"
"'M a damn fool," said Ben agreeably, and swayed back from the quicksand, grinning at Reuben's light. "Fact 'm drunk."
Reuben laughed. "That I know. Don't move your feet. Stay as you are till I come to you." Laughing still, he picked his way along the edge of the water and the foulness, to the narrow strip of solid ground that Ben's luck had found for him in the dark. "Pee-yew!" said Reuben, and clutched a handful of Ben's shirt. "With such a breath why walk? Why not float, friend?"