It was he who had killed them.
He rose up and gathered them in his arms,—and cuddled them in the skirts of his skeepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that he might carry them, and so, thus burdened with their weight, set his face to the snow and the wind once more, and began his downward way.
Once a great sob shook him; that was all. Now he had no fear.
The night might have been noonday, the snow storm might have been summer, for aught he knew or cared.
Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to rest; often the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his eyelids, and he longed to lie down and be at rest, as the little brothers were; often it seemed to him that he would never reach home again. But he shook the lethargy off him and resisted the longing, and held on his way: he knew that his mother would mourn for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At length, through all difficulty and danger, when his light had spent itself and his strength had well nigh spent itself too, his feet touched the old highroad. There were flickering torches and many people, and loud cries around the church, as there had been four hundred years before, when the last sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king in peril above.
His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen long before it was dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber, and had found the bed of Findelkind empty once more.
He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in his arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbors nor the frenzied joy of his mother: his eyes looked straight before him, and his face was white like the snow.
"I killed them," he said, and then two great tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two little dead brothers.
Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that.
Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them!"