"But we fight the same fight now."
"Yes. Until we both win—or both die."
Before he could speak again, a strange answer came out of the darkness. "Not two of you," a croaking old voice told them. It rose, shrill and cracked, from the shadows beyond the fire. They turned, and the moonlight showed a bent old figure hobbling toward them.
It was old Elmira, her cane tapping along in front of her; and something that caught the moonlight lay in the hollow of her left arm. Her eyes still glowed under the grizzled brows.
"Not two, but three," she corrected, in the hollow voice of uncounted years. In the magic of the moonlight it seemed quite fitting to both of them that she should have come. She was one of the triumvirate; they wondered why they had not missed her before. It was farther than she had walked in years, but her spirit had kept her up.
She put the glittering object that she carried into Bruce's hands. It was a rifle—a repeating breechloader of a famous make and a model of thirty years before. It was such a rifle as lives in legend, with sights as fine as a razor edge and an accuracy as great as light itself. Loving hands had polished it and kept it in perfect condition.
"Matthew Folger's rifle," the old woman explained, "for Matthew Folger's son."
And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth—as most men do, unless death cheats them first—and how he made a pact to pay old debts of death.