“Have you forgiven me for overhearing what you never meant for me?” said I.
“Child, I bless you for it: but for you we might not have had back again what my prattling lost.”
All this time no one spoke to Ravenutzi. Trastevera stopped before him for a moment or two, and some wordless assurance of reconciliation passed between them. He had not asked for farewells from his own people and the Outliers had not suggested it. All being over, the four men began to walk from the camp and away from the sun. As they passed the old King of the Far-Folk, he stood up, biting his long beard.
“Oh, my King,” said Ravenutzi, speaking loud that the Outliers might suspect no hidden communication, “I have done what I could.”
“O smith,” said Oca, bitter with impotence, “it shall be remembered.”
They passed on until they had reached a knoll that lifted them clear of intervening scrub. They stood there, turned facing us; the light, strong against them, made them indistinct, the wind blurred the folds of their garments. I looked about expecting one with the Cup, and saw instead a score of the slingsmen measuring off their ground.
They stood with the sun to their backs and swung their slings lightly to free them for action. Until that moment I had not a notion what was really forward, nor I think had the Far-Folk. When they heard the slight preparatory whistling of the slings I saw the wife of Ravenutzi start as if they had stung upon her flesh. She looked up and saw the four standing so quietly and the young men with their slings drawn to position across the grassy intervening space. Noiselessly she sprang up and began running. Swiftly as she cleared the space between her and Ravenutzi it was not swift enough. The word was given, the slings were up and whirling; swifter than birds the stones took their flight. I saw her leaping on the knoll and her husband’s arms opened to receive her, then I heard the singing of the stones and saw them go down, with her body across his, all so quietly, as grass is mown in summer.
XV
HOW HERMAN AND I CAME BACK TO BROKEN TREE
Before any bird awoke, and while the wood was morning gray, the Outliers began to move westward next day from Leaping Water. Morning did not break but there was a widening of the gray space, a warming of the slight wind, and then the chill that settled into weeping fog. Blunt crowns of hills peered at us through the parting mist, and seemed mysteriously to move behind it and at the next lifting peer upon us from another quarter. Dim files of trees marched down upon us from obscurity and marched away again. Far to the left we heard the rain charging the river cañon, and the stir of invisible cohorts enfilading behind the locked ranges.
I could not make out where we were, except that our general movement was toward lower ground, and from the position of a pale yellow blur that appeared in the sky about midday, I gathered that we had moved south and west. In this space of half obscurity, wet mist, sodden grass, pale shadow and pale sun, the Far-Folk moved with us. Neither they nor Herman nor I cared to ask what was meant toward us, nor speculated as to what we should do about it. I suppose no philosophy could have devised more justice in the end than the working of their own natures had brought to pass. Whoever had met death on this occasion had met it so much of his own act that the event left no sense of mal-adjustment, and with it died both remorse and recrimination.