“Ah, when?”
“Just now when I came upon you. And when they talk of the King’s Desire. From the way you look when they talk of selling it to secure the title to their land, I gather the Far-Folk won’t be very well pleased with that disposition.”
“Would you expect it, seeing that it belongs to us?”
“But does it?”
“Who but our fathers brought it from the Door of Death? It makes no difference with belonging that the Outliers have kept us out of our own so many years.”
“If it comes to that,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to me to belong to either of you.”
“It was ours in the beginning. Be sure it will come in the end to our hand again.”
“Was that what you were thinking about when I came up?”
“I suppose so. I often think about it. An ill subject for a good day.” He rose up to dismiss it. “Let us go and see if the spring is full.”
We went up through the tall timber through a chain of grassy meadows, little meadows planted fair with incense shrub and hound’s tongue and trillium. We nibbled sprigs of young fir, surprised birds at their mating and a buck pawing in the soft earth. I do not remember if the spring was full or not, but I recall very well that as we came back skirting the edge of under-grown forest, stiff with stems like a wall, Ravenutzi made a great to-do because he had lost my token. That was singular to me, because a little time before when he helped me over a bog I had seen it sticking quite firmly in the crossing of his girdle. He would not go back to look for it, insisted rather that we should go around by the Laurel Bank where toyon grew, and gather its belated berries to make another. So being very gay about it, and laughing a great deal, we got back to camp with Ravenutzi’s belt stuck full of laurel and toyon, the last hour of the morning. This was about the time the treasure diggers, setting three of their party on the faint trail they had found, turned back toward Deep Fern.