“Am I accepted, chief; am I accepted?” The man trembled with the hope of deliverance.
“You are accepted,” the chief admitted, seeing there was no one disposed to deny him. There was a space of stillness in the bright palpitating noon before Persilope, measuring the heap of gold and jeweled vessels with his eye, had turned back and said: “It wants yet another.”
Then I saw his wife leaning a little from where she sat with her glance still fixed and compelling. I followed it past the line of elders and found it fixed on Ravenutzi. Before I could shape in my mind what wordless urgency lay behind that look, I saw the smith rise slowly, and stepping carefully among the rows of seated captives, come and stand beside Prassade and the two others. Trastevera sunk backward in her seat with the look of one justified in a long belief.
“I,” he said, “offer myself.”
At this simple and unexpected intrusion of the smith into the situation, there burst from the Outliers a sudden sharp hiss of refusal and indignation. It was followed instantly after by harsh ironical laughter. Cries sounded, here and there two arms and a head cast up, like the crest of a wolf out of a pack, protestingly, and hands pulled him down again.
“The smith, the smith!” they cried. “A reparation, a reparation!”
They were fierce for the moment with the irony of the situation and their grim enjoyment of it. Yet, though there was a kind of justice in making the man who had dared most to possess the King’s Desire the best keeper of it, I thought they might easily have found a better punishment. Ravenutzi was, as I believed, a man of great sensibility. There must have been many things in that connection he would be wishful to forget. And I could not understand why his willingness to take the Cup in such company confirmed in Trastevera the hope of a latent nobleness in him which had been her own excuse for her former kindness. Neither could I any more understand the unmirthful humor of the Outliers.
Nor, I think, did the Far-Folk then understand it, looking askance and half hopeful, as if in spite of everything they expected Ravenutzi’s wit to bring something out of the situation to their profit. But the Outliers continuing to shout: “The smith, the smith! A reparation!” Persilope was obliged formally to announce his acceptance.
Ravenutzi’s part in the reburial of the Treasure being settled, the four men went to work to cord it up conveniently for carrying. Without further ceremony they took tools for digging and set out from the camp with the Treasure swung between them. They went toward the deep forest and by such a trail that, when they had passed over a little rise of ground a few hundred yards from us, no one could see the way they went. No one moved from his place lest he should accuse himself of a wish to do so.
We sat and watched below us the banner of the Leap stream through its irised changes, saw the shadows shrink and stretch toward afternoon. Sat so still that a little black bear came out of the manzanita and whoofed and ran across the outstretched legs of the Outliers, and a troop of deer trotted up from the valley and stared soft-eyed at us, skirting the rim of the hollow. Two or three hours went over us, and hawks began to dart out of the scrub to hunt before we heard the four returning. They were tired, overdone, but they had bathed at the creek and set their clothing in order. No soiling traces betrayed where they had been.