Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

OUTLAND

BY

MARY AUSTIN

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

New York 1919

Copyright, 1919, by

Boni & Liveright, Inc.

Printed in the U. S. A.

CONTENTS

OUTLAND

I
CONCERNING THE TRAIL AT BROKEN TREE

The trail begins at the Broken Tree with the hawk’s nest. As often as we have talked of it since, Herman and I, and that is as often as the ceanothus blooms untimely for a sign of rains delayed, or there is a low moon and a following star, or a wind out of the south with the smell of wild honey in it, we have agreed together that the trail begins at Broken Tree.

There were some other landmarks I was quite as sure of at the time, but the creek makes so many turns here I could never find them again, and the second time of Herman’s going in, he had altogether other things to think about. So as often as we have occasion to talk of it, we end by saying that it begins at Broken Tree.

I remember very well how Fairshore looked that day as we stood gazing back at it from the edge of the plowed lands; the pines sketched blackly against the smudgy, fawn-colored slope, the sea as blue as lazuli, and the leaning surf. I had another reason for remembering it, since it was the last time of Herman’s asking and of my refusing to marry him. I don’t know why Herman’s being a professor of sociology should have led him to suppose that our liking the same sort of books and much the same people, and having between us an income fairly adequate to the exigencies of comfortable living, should have been reason enough for my marrying him, but he had spent a great deal of time that summer trying to convince me that it was. I recall being rather short with him that afternoon. For, in the first place, if I had meant to marry Herman I should not have put all I had into a house at Fairshore, and in the next place, though I had not got to the point of admitting it, the house was proving rather a failure.

For a long time I had believed that it needed but a little space of collected quietness for the vague presages of my spirit to burst freely into power. Somewhere within myself I was aware of a vast, undiscovered country full of wandering lights and crying voices, from whence the springs of great undertakings should issue. But now that the house was accomplished and my position in the English Department definitely resigned, all that I had got by it was an insuperable dryness of heart and a great deal of time which hung rather heavily upon my hands. I had done no work at Fairshore that I was willing to confess to in print. I know I should not, until I could escape from this inward desertness into that quarter from whence still, at times, I could feel a wind blowing that trumpeted up all the lagging forces of my soul. And just when I was wanting most to know passion and great freedom of feeling, Herman’s offer of a reasonable marriage, of which the particular recommendation was that no feeling went to it, took on the complexion of a personal affront. The more so since there was no very definite way in which I could make clear to Herman just what offended me.

He was going on that afternoon to explain to me how, in a marriage free from the disturbances of passion incidental to temperamental matings, I should be at ease to give myself wholly to the business of book-making. With all his understanding, Herman was fully possessed of that Academic notion that literature can be produced by taking pains instead of having them. He was very patient with me through it all, crediting my indifference to overwork and to nerves, as a man does with a woman when he is at a loss to know what is the matter with her. The truth was, if I was tired of anything, it was of being the very things Herman most admired in me. I was growing every moment more exasperated. By the time he had got to the point of wanting to know what more there was that he could say, I had reached the pitch of replying that there could be nothing more unless he wished to say the usual thing.

“And that?” He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his lifted brows.

“Would be merely that you love me and can’t live without me.”

“Oh, if you want me to say what the grocer’s man says to the cook in the kitchen!”—he flushed—“but you know very well, Mona, that I am not going to insult your intelligence and mine with the clap-trap of passion. Certainly I’ve no such cheap sort of feeling for you, and I’m not such an infernal cad as to suppose you have——Mona?”

It might have been the wind that blew from the country beyond Broken Tree at that moment, or something in my face, that turned that last repetition of my name upon the point of interrogation. Though it was my crying objection to Herman that he could not produce in me those raptures and alarms and whirlings to and fro, out of which I knew all creative art to proceed, yet to have him so renounce for us both the possibility of such a relation filled me with sudden wounding and affront. And at that, or at some new shadow of wonder in his eyes with the turning of his voice upon the word, I found myself so little able to give back look for look, that it was a great relief to me to discover the hawk’s nest in the Broken Tree. The creek makes a turn here, and the stepping-stones were so far apart it was necessary for Herman to go ahead and reach me back his hand. As I swung past him I heard him say my name again with so new a touch of shamed credulity that I was glad to put my hand up over my eyes, making believe I had not heard him, and look very attentively at Broken Tree.

It stands on the upper bank of the creek, snapped off midway by the wind. Below the break two great sweeping boughs spread either way like the arms of a guide-post. The nest is in the splintered hollow of the trunk.

“It is a nest,” I said, as though a doubt I had were the reason for my not hearing him. Herman was so used to this sort of interruption when we walked in the woods together that I hoped it had a natural sound. He answered quite simply that if it was, it should be empty by this time of the year. Suddenly the hawk, unfurling from the upper branches, pitched a slow downward spiral above our heads, then beat back into upper air, uttering sharp cries, and, settling slowly to the left, preened himself and neglected us. As if being but a watchman, having cried our coming, he had no other interest in the affair.

Just beyond the pine there was a thicket of wild lilac grown across the way, and as I put up my hand to defend my face, I saw that a light spray of it had burst untimely into bloom. Though this was the second week in October the grass was brittle as new silk and the earth was hard with drought. I remember holding the branch toward Herman for him to see.

“Look how it calls the rain,” I said, and perhaps something more, though I do not remember what, about the effort of nature to rise to its own expectancy. I said that first because it was exactly the sort of thing I knew Herman, who thought he had entirely rationalized his attitude toward out of doors, liked least to hear me say. But, perhaps, because the shadow of the adventure which was to prove him wrong about that and so many things was already over us, he had no answer but to reach out across my shoulder and put up his hand over mine to bear back the heavy branch. This was so little the sort of thing I had learned to expect of Herman, and we were both so embarrassed by it, that we could never be quite sure which of us saw it first. When we had pushed aside the ceanothus there lay the beginning of the trail.

It began directly at the foot of the pine as though there was some reason for it, and ran shallow and well-defined through the lilac thicket and up the hill.

Herman said it was a deer trail. To the casual eye it did resemble one of those woodland tracks made by wild creatures, beginning at no particular point, and after continuing clear and direct for a little distance, breaking off for no reason. But there was about this trail a subtlety, a nuance, slight distinctions in the way the scrub was bent back from it, in the way it took the slope of the hill, that made it plainly a man trail. More than that, I felt the slight pricking of the blood, the quick response of the intelligence to the stimulus of variations so slight the observation of them lies almost below the plane of consciousness. Herman, wanting such witness in himself, could not believe, and was concerned over my mistake. So we went on walking in it, Herman very well satisfied with his argument, and I saying nothing more about it. As I frequently have to do when Herman gets talking of the things which are my province.

It was very quiet in the wood that day, scarcely a bird abroad; now and then a still, winged insect threaded the green and gold arcades of the great fern, or a long sigh from the sea, passed up the hill along the top of the pines.

The trail cleared the scrub and went between young trees, skirting a hollow planted with lean, sombre boles. The ground beneath was white with the droppings of shadow-haunting birds. Beyond that there was more open going among splay-footed oaks, crusted thick with emerald moss, all a-drip from their outer branches with the filmy lace of lichen. Then a pleasant grassy space of pines before the close locked redwoods began.

I do not know how long we had been following before we heard the jays, but we had come into a little open glade where lilies grew, through which the trail seemed to lead to one of those places where you have always wished to be. There we heard them crying our approach. Herman said they were jays, and the first one might have been. I know the high, strident call they have, which another hears and repeats, and another, until all the wood is cautious and awake. But one jay calls exactly like every other, and about this there was a modulation that assured while it warned; that said: “I have heard; have no concern for me.” And even I could not have fancied so much as that in the mere squawking of jays.

“Be still,” I said to Herman, who was protesting cheerfully behind me; “you have waked the wood people and now we shan’t see any of them.”

“What people?”

“The people who walk in the woods and leave the meadows warm and tender, whom you feel by the pricking between your shoulders when you come upon the places where they have been. The people who made this trail, whom we heard calling one to another just now. The people——” And just then we came upon the faggot.

It lay close beside the trail, little sticks all in order except a last handful dropped hurriedly on top when the faggot-gatherer had started at our approach.

“Look!” I said; “that is what they were doing when we came stumbling on them.”

It was a faggot, I shall always insist that it was a faggot, and I should have said so if nothing had happened afterward to prove it. Herman kicked it impatiently with his foot.

“There’s a literary temperament for you,” he protested. “You find a trail made by wood-choppers, you hear jays squawking and see a heap of brushwood. Straightway you create a race of people to account for them.”

“You said it was a deer trail a while ago,” I hinted, and Herman laughed.

It was still and warm in the glade; the needles lay thick and soft and no grass grew. The scent of the yerba buena stole upon us intermittently, delicate pungent gusts answering each to each like speech. All around the sunlight lay, a thing palpable, as if, like the needles, it had not been lifted for a thousand years, but mellowed there like wine. Herman stretched himself on the brown thick litter beside me.

“Aha,” he said, “if this belongs to your wood people they know a good thing. It’s very nice of them to lend it to us for a while. I don’t seem to feel any pricks between my shoulders, but my heart beats remarkably; so don’t give me up yet, Mona.”

That was exactly like Herman, to argue with your best beliefs until you begin to think there is no other way than to subvert your whole scheme of existence, or to break off all connection with him. And then he abandons his position with a suddenness that leaves you toppling over your own defenses.

For a moment I thought he might be going to revert to the matter of my marrying him, but he lay tossing lightly at the dropped needles, and the even breathing silence of the wood closed in again. We sat so long that we were startled on discovering that if Herman got back to the Inn in time for the stage that was to take him to his train, we would have to run for it. And that, I suppose, was why we took so little notice of the landmarks going out, that, though I tried the very next afternoon, I could not find the trail again.

I wanted to find it too, for if I could once prove to Herman that there was a reality behind that sense of presence in the woods he credited to the whimseys of a literary imagination, I should somehow put myself in a better case for proving—well, I did not know quite what, but I wanted to find that trail.

I tried that day and the next. Twice I found the glade and the sun-steeped yerba buena, for the day was warm and the scent of it carried far, and once I got past Broken Tree, but I could never come into the trail in any manner.

Then one day when I had almost given up finding it, and had been a long time in the woods without thinking about it, I found myself walking in the glade again, and the first thing I noticed was that the faggot was gone. Although I had been so sure of its being a faggot in the first place, I was a little startled at missing it, but not in the least alarmed. The day was full of the warm dry fog that goes before a rain; it cleared the ground and curled midway of the tall, fluted trees like altar smoke. I followed along the track, which ran narrowly between the redwood boles toward an open space, at the back of which was the pool of a spring. It gleamed under a leaning bay tree, silver tipped with light. And there beside it was a man who so matched with the color of the dappled earth that, except for the motions of his singular employment, I might have missed seeing him altogether. He was of a long clean shape, dressed as to the upper part of his body in a close-fitting coat of gray mole-skin. His feet were covered with sandals. Long bands of leather and of a green cloth, coarse like linen, were laced about, midway of his thighs. His coat had been loosened at the shoulders, baring his breast and arms, and as he lay on the bank of the pool, he leaned above it and studied the reflection of his face. He had leaves of some strange herb in his hand which he squeezed together, and having dipped it in the water rubbed upon his face and hair, watching the effect in the pool.

It was his hair that caught my attention most, for it was thick and waving, and most singularly streaked with white. That was the more strange because the body of him looked lithe and young. It occurred to me that he might be remedying an offensive grayness as he dipped and rubbed and stooped to mirror himself the better in the bright water. But before I had made up my mind to anything further, he turned and saw me.

The first thing he did was to thrust the hand that held the herb straight down into the water with a deliberate movement—all the while holding my gaze with great fixity of purpose, as though he would not so much as let it question what he did. Presently withdrawing the hand empty, he stood up.

As he drew erect and clasped the upper part of his tunic, I saw that around his body was a sort of sash of green cloth wrapped several times, and stuck through the folds of it, various tools of the cruder sort of silversmiths. Also, though his figure was young, the skin of his face was drawn in fine wrinkles. He had a thin, high nose with a slightly mobile tip that seemed to twitch a little with distrust as he looked at me. The mouth below it was full and curved, his eyes bluish black, opaque and velvet-looking; windows out of which came and looked boldness, cunning and power, and the wistfulness of the wild creature questioning its kinship with man. All this without so much as altering a muscle of his face or removing his gaze from mine. Then he stepped back a pace against the yielding boughs, which seemed to give like doors, and received him without crackling or sensible displacement into the silence of the wood.

II
I MEET THE OUTLIERS IN THE WOOD AND HERMAN COMES TO FIND ME

When Herman got my letter concerning the dark man under the bay tree, he was wholly at loss what to make of it. He was quite habituated to my method of making believe to be a story before writing it, and was always willing to play up to his part as soon as he learned what that was, but in this case I had neglected to tell him. While he was reading the letter over, it occurred to him the whole thing might be merely a childish pique because he had scoffed at my wood people in the first place, and was rather annoyed at it.

But as often as he went back to the letter he found a note of conviction in it—for I had written it immediately after the adventure—that overrode both of these interpretations.

After that he was divided between the fear that I really had been overworking and a period of mild hallucination had set in, or the possibility that I could have met some sort of wild person in the forest who might do me an injury. The most disturbing thing in the letter was the declaration that I meant to go back as soon as I could and find out all about the woodlander. The result of all this was that after having written me a separate letter based on each one of these beliefs, and having destroyed it, Herman left the University Friday morning and came down to find out, if possible, what really had occurred.

He arrived on the stage that reaches Fairshore at half-past one, and as he had come directly from his lecture room, he had first to have lunch and change to his out-of-door clothes. This made it the middle of the afternoon before he reached the cottage. As soon as he had a glimpse of it, he experienced a sinking of the heart that warned him that I was not there. However, he went through the formality of knocking at the front door before going round to see if I had left the key, as I did for short absences, or had taken it to the Inn as when I meant to be away several days. He found the key in the accustomed place, and something more alarming. Inside the screened porch at the back were the three little bottles of milk which the milkman had left there each evening that I had been away. So I had been gone three days!

The first thing was to make sure that I was not at Mira Monte or at Idlewild, where I went sometimes as the mood demanded. He was very cautious about making inquiries at the post-office and the Inn, for, of course, I hadn’t given Herman any right to be interested in my whereabouts. And, of course, if I really had gone off to hunt for hypothetical people in the woods, I shouldn’t want it talked about. At the end of an hour he had learned nothing more definite than that if I had gone out of town it had not been by the regular stages, and nobody knew when or where.

He decided then that the occasion justified his going into the house to find out if I had taken my suit-case, or anything that would give a clue. By the time he got back to the cottage it was past four o’clock, and the milkman had been his round. There were now four little bottles on the ledge. This somehow seemed to Herman so alarming a circumstance, with its implication of unexpected detention, that with scarcely more than a glance about the house, he put some crackers and my traveling flask into his pocket and set out almost running for Broken Tree.

He said that he found the place with very little difficulty, and without noticing particularly the way he came. I have thought since it might be one of the conditions of going there, that you must be thinking altogether of other matters and be concerned in the going for something more than yourself.

Herman found the trail and followed it as far as the place of the faggot, and on to the point where I had seen the tall man washing his hair at the spring. Though he could have had no reasonable expectation he had unconsciously counted on finding some trace of me in that neighborhood, and, disappointed in that, was at loss what to do. The trail, which ran out indistinguishably in the meadow, began again on the other side. After losing half an hour in picking it up again, he came on half fearfully, anticipating he knew not what dread evidence at every turn.

The redwoods grew close here and the space between was filled with bluish gloom shot with long arrows of the westering sun. The trail ran crookedly among the clutching roots. Stumbling near-sightedly among them, he lost it wholly and so came by accident upon what otherwise he might have missed. Where the forest sheered away from a blank, stony ledge sticking out of a hill, there was a clear space with some small ferns and a seeping spring. In the soft earth about it he found prints of feet he thought to be mine, and beside it, broad and strong, the heavy feet of men. It was by now nearly dark, and Herman was so genuinely alarmed and so poor a woodman that he knew no better than to dash back among the redwoods hunting wildly for the trail and shouting, “Mona! Mona!” for all the wood to hear.

What had really happened to me was alarming enough to think of, though in truth I had not been very much alarmed by it at the time. The morning after my writing to Herman had been one of those pricking days that come in the turn of the seasons. Such a sparkle on the approaching water, such a trumpeting from the hills, the high vault full of flying cloud, that I struck with great confidence into the trail some distance beyond Broken Tree.

I followed along where it ran in a space wide as a wagon track, and opened into a meadow full of the airy whiteness of small bloom, floating above the late yellow lilies and the glinting grass. I sat down at its farther ledge, leaning against the curled roots of the redwood, and got as much comfort from it as though I had been propped by a human shoulder, so full was all the earth of friendly warmth and quietness.

There was neither sun nor shadow nor moving wind. I sat and browsed along the edge of sleep, slipped in and out, dozed and woke to watch the lilies: lost myself, and snapped alert to see the eyes of a man, ruddy and well-looking, fixed upon me from between the shouldering trees. Not a twig had snapped nor one bough clicked against another, but there he stood like a stag gazing, uncurious and at ease. When he perceived that I was aware of him he stepped toward me, throwing up his head, uttering the high strident cry of jays, followed by one bird-call and another, which seemed to be answered in kind from within the forest.

He was a man of about forty, burned by the sun with thick, tawny locks and a pointed, russet beard, wearing a single garment of untanned skin that came midway of his arms and thighs. There were sandals on his feet and strips of leather bound about protected him to the knees. He was belted about the body with a curious implement that might have been a sling, and from his hand swung a brace or two of quail.

The singular part of this adventure was that while he stood there communicating in his strange wordless fashion with all the birds in the woods, I was not afraid. He was standing over me in such a manner that I could not have escaped him if I would. Really I had no thought of doing so, but sat looking as he looked at me, and not in the least afraid.

So occupied were we both with this mutual inspection that I did not quite know how nor from what quarter three men came out from among the trees and stood beside him. One of them was red and sturdy like the first, one was old, with a white beard curling back from his face like the surf from a rock, but exceedingly well built and with great heaps of gnarly muscles along his breast and arms. The third was the dark man I had seen washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay.

They all looked at me with amazement and some consternation. Words passed between them in a strange tongue, though it was plain they referred to the manner of their finding me, and what was to be done about it. At length, the old man having said something to the effect that whatever I might be I did not appear particularly dangerous, they laughed, all of them, and made a sign that I was to come with them along the trail.

We moved slowly; my captors, for so I was to regard them, so disposing themselves as we went that I was scarcely aware of them. We moved stealthily from bole to bole, mingling so with the tawny and amber shadows, that time by time I hesitated, thinking myself abandoned. Then I heard the old man’s throaty chuckle like the movement of slow water among stones, or caught the bright, regardful eyes of Ravenutzi fixed upon me from behind the interlacing boughs.

After an hour’s walking we came to a bramble-fenced hollow, ringed with very tall trees, smelling of the sun. Here there might be a dozen of the wood folks, with four women among them, lying up like deer through the bright betraying noon.

Almost the first thing I noticed was that there was no curiosity among them of a prying sort over my appearance, and no fear. As if they had never imagined that one of my sort could do them harm. But there was regretfulness, particularly among the women, that appeared to be strangely for my sake, and a very grave concern. Moreover, when I spoke,—for I was moved to speak at once and declare that whatever the appearance of my coming among them, I meant no harm,—they turned all toward me, as if merely by attending quietly on this strange tongue they could make out what was said. I presently discovered that they had made it out, and by keeping this same considered quietness, without straining or trying to think what the words were, I was able to know what went on about me. Although it was several days before I could communicate fully, and I do not know yet, nor does Herman know, what language the Outliers spoke among themselves, we were able to get along very well in it.

They drew around me in a circle, which was left open at one side to admit a man whom I guessed at once by his bearing, as well as the deference they paid him, to be some sort of chief to them.

He was of a singular and appealing beauty, so that his bodily excellence was a garment to him, and adorned the simplicity of his dress. There was that in his way of standing which moved one to go up and lay hand on him as on the stem of a young cedar. But something stood within him that protected him more than a weapon from such impersonality. As he waited to hear the account of me which the red man gave, I felt I had never such a wish to have a man think well of me, nor been so much at a loss how to begin it. At the same time he seemed to be hearkening to something within himself, something that, when he asked a question of the women (which passed from one to another of them with something of denial and disclaimer), seemed to speak more loudly. The question appeared to refer to something which should have settled my business then and there. The neglect of it devolved upon a woman, comely and perplexed, as though given to too great a sense of responsibility, and much overcome at being found at fault.

“No matter,” he said to her excuses, and bending a troubled look on me, the doubt in him spoke out openly.

“It was of this, I think, she spoke to me.”

At that slight emphasis the dark man who had the smith’s tools on him, looked at me with so sharp and surprising an interest that it distracted me from noticing who it was behind me asked with some eagerness:

“Of what did she speak?”

“That there was one walking toward us on the trail, bearing trouble. On the morning of our leaving, she waked me early to say it. I am thinking this is the one. If you have forgotten the cup, Evarra, it is an omen.”

The interest of all the wood folk reawakened. They began to regard me with so much distrust that I was relieved when the chief made a sign to Noche to take me a little to one side. Thus they talk more freely, looking at me from time to time, sometimes seeming to blame the woman, and sometimes to praise her.

Noche was that same old man who had brought me from the neighborhood of Broken Tree, whose mild blue eyes, set rather shallowly in a broad face, continued to reassure me.

He sat off a considerate distance, and busied himself with plaiting of leather thongs. All his features were rugged, the mouth wide, the nose broad and open at the nostrils, but blunted all as if by some yielding humor in him which fitted oddly with the knotting of his muscles. Now and then he turned toward me with chuckling, slow laughter which served in place of comforting speech.

Whatever conclusion the woodlanders came to about me, it was not to take immediate effect. They talked or lay quietly in the fern as deer lie. They slept much, but always with some on guard, dropping off with even breathing peace, and waking without start or stretching, as if wakefulness were but a wind that stirred them by times, and sleep the cessation of the stir.

Toward evening they rose and cooked a meal, of which I had my share—deer meat, wild honey in the honey-comb, and some strange bread. Two or three others came in from hunting; they were dressed much the same as the red man who had found me, and carried slings in their belts or slung upon their shoulders. The west was red and the pines black against it. There rose a light ruffle of wind and sighed through the wood. With it passed through the camp an audible breath of expectation. One of the women stood up with water in a bowl of bark, holding it high above her head in the manner of one celebrating a ritual, crooning some words to which the others made a breathy, soft response. She turned the water out upon the fire, the ashes of which Noche deftly covered, then, extending the bowl toward the young leader, she smiled, saying:

“The word is with you, Persilope.”

He took the vessel from her, scattering its few remaining drops westward.

“To the sea!” he said; “down to the sea!”

“To the sea!” cried the Outliers, and laughed and girt themselves. Suddenly I found myself caught up into a kind of litter or swing made of broad bands of skin, in a position of great uneasiness to myself, between the shoulders of two men. The whole body of woodlanders set off rapidly, but in their former noiseless fashion, going seaward.

The moon was up and the tide far out when we issued upon the promontory called Cypress Point. There was little surf, and the glimmer of the tide ran like silvered serpents all along the rocks. With a shout the Outliers stripped and cut the molten water with their shining bodies; laughed and plunged and rose again, laughing and blowing the spray as long as the moon lasted. They were at it again with the earliest light, and I should have known they were gathering sea food without what one of the women told me, of a great occasion going forward at their home which lay far from here, and a great feast of all the tribe. When the tide allowed, they gathered fish and abalones, which the women carried to some secret place among the pines to cure and dry.

When the tide was up the Outliers lay by in the dark rooms of cypress, bedded on the thick, resistant boughs, or stretched along the ancient trunks so wried and bent to purposes of concealment. Often in the heat, when there was cessation of the low whispering tones and light easy laughter, I would rise up suddenly seeming to myself quite alone only to discover by the stir of the wind on hair or garment the watchers lying close, untroubled and observant. While they worked I lay bound lightly under the wind-depressed cypresses where no light reached, but strange checkered gleams of it like phosphorescent eyes.

By night I could hear the Outliers shouting strongly in the surf, and saw by day the Chinese fishing-boats from Pescadera crawl along the rocks, and the smoke of coasting steamers trailing a shadow like a dark snake on the sea’s surface, polished by the heat. The men worked with good-will and laughter, always with watchers out. If one moment they were hauling at the nets, at a mere squeak of warning there would not be to the unpracticed eye so much as the glint of the sun on bare skin. Once a great red car came careering around the point, all the occupants absorbed in Bridge, just when the sea was at its best, a sapphire sparkle moving under an enchanted mist and the land luminous with reflected light.

We could see the casual turning of the owner’s head as some invisible string from the guard’s stretched, pointed finger seemed to move it like a mechanical toy. Almost before it rounded the curve, old Noche took himself out of the seaweed and blew foam at them in derision.

The care and keeping of me fell to Evarra, by whose neglect a proper dealing with me was kept in abeyance, and to old Noche, with whom I began to be very well acquainted. Noche had the soul of a craftsman, though with no very great gift. Whenever the smith was busy at a forge improvised of two beach stones and a flint, mending fishhooks and hammering spear-heads from bits of metal picked up along the sand, Noche would choose to lie puffing his cheeks to blow the fire while Ravenutzi fitted his movements to the rhythm of the wind as it rose to cover the light clink of his hammers. Or the old man would sit with his lips a little apart and in his eyes the bright fixity of a child’s, laying out iridescent fragments of abalone in curious patterns in which Ravenutzi took the greatest interest.

It was singular to me that the design the old man struggled with oftenest, the smith let pass. I had observed this the more because I became sure that there was no smallest hint of it escaped him, and the suspicion was fixed in my mind by its revelation of a great singularity in the character of Ravenutzi himself.

Time and again I had seen Noche laying out his abalone pearls in a design which, however dearly it was borne within his mind, seemed reluctant in expression. He would place the salient points of his pattern, connecting them by tracings in the sand, and when he had taken the greatest pains with it, startled, would sweep out the whole with his hand. There were times when its preciousness so grew upon him that he would not even commit it to the dust, but formed the delicate outline with his finger in the air.

One of those occasions, when it was full noon, and the tide charged thunderously along the coast, all the Outliers lying up in the windy gloom of the cypresses, I knew by the absorbed and breathless look of him that Noche had accomplished for once the whole of his design. He bent above it crooning in his beard, so absorbed in the complete and lonely joy of creation that he neither saw nor sensed the shifting of the stooped, twisty trunks above him to the form of Ravenutzi.

How he had come there I could not imagine, but there he bent from the flat-topped foliage, the mouth avid, the eyes burning and curious. As the shifting of his position brought him into line with my gaze he passed to a fixed intentness that held me arrested even in the process of thought. It left me uncertain as to whether it were not I who had been caught spying instead of Ravenutzi, and merely to meet that look in me had been, after all, the object of his secret scrutiny.

And this was what separated him from the others more than his dark skin and his clipped and nasal speech, making me sure, before I had heard a word of the Far-Folk, of some alien blood in him. Whatever one of the Outliers did, whether you agreed with him or not, there was at least no doubt about it.

That was how the days were going with me all the time Herman was writing me letters and tearing them up again, deciding that I was mad or foolish or both.

On the evening of the last day, about the time he had entered on the trail by Broken Tree, we were setting out for I knew not what far home of the Outliers. I was carried still in my litter, but that was more kindness than captivity, for though I count myself a good walker, I made poor work of keeping even with their light, running stride. We were not many hours out; it was after moonset, and I had lost all track of the time or the way, being a little sick with the motion, and very tired of it. I could guess this much, that we were rounding a steep and thick-set hill by what might have been an abandoned wagon road, for our pace increased here. Suddenly the company was arrested by sharp resounding cries and the crackling of underbrush on the slope above us. So does the night estrange familiar things, that I could get no clue at all to what the cries might be, except that it was some creature blundering and crying distressfully, making as if to cross our trail.

The Outliers were themselves alarmed by it, and considered a moment whether they should halt to let it pass before us or hurry on to leave it behind. But the check and the beginning of movement had caught the attention of the lost creature, for it turned directly toward us, and begun to come on more rapidly, redoubling its cries. Now I thought, though it seemed so extraordinary, that it said “Mona!” in a wild and urgent manner. Then it seemed to have slipped or bounded, for the slope was steep, and fell with a great clatter of stones and snapping of stems directly in our trail.

Several of the men precipitated themselves upon it. There was a short struggle, muffled groans, and quiet. One of them struck a light from his flint and showed a man, scratched and disheveled, lifted in the grip of Noche, lying limp and faint back from the knotted arms. I turned faint myself to see that it was Herman.

III
I HEAR OF THE TREASURE AND MEET A FRIEND OF RAVENUTZI

It was the very next day, and before I had learned as much of Herman’s adventure as I have already set down, that I began to hear of the Treasure. My hearing became the means of my knowing all that happened afterwards in Outland on account of it.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I came out of Evarra’s hut and found Herman, with his head bandaged, lying on a heap of skins with old Noche on guard, plaiting slings. He had a loop of raw hide about one foot stretched straight before him to keep it taut as he plaited. Now and then he turned his face toward us with a wordless reassurance, but chiefly his attention was taken by the children, who cooed and bobbed their heads together within the shadow.

Back of them the redwoods stood up thick as organ pipes, and when the wind stirred, the space above was filled with the click of dropping needles and the flicker of light displaced. I was going on to inquire of Herman how he happened to come stumbling on my trail when I thought him safe at the University, but Noche making a noise of disapproval in his throat, I left off at once, and began to attend to the talk of the children. It grew clear as I fixed upon it or lapsed into unmeaning murmurs as my mind wandered. There were four or five of them busy about those curious structures that children build with pebbles and potsherds and mounds of patted dust, set off by a feather or a flower. Noche, it appeared, was very good at this sort of thing. To their great delight, he was persuaded to undertake a more imposing mound than they could manage for themselves; and presently I had made out idly that the structure in the dust was the pattern of a story he was telling them. It was all of a king’s treasure. Seventy bracelets of gold, he said, all of fine work, chased and hammered, and belts of linked gold, and buckles set with colored stones. He took pebbles from the creek and petals of flowers to show them how that was, and every child was for making one for himself, for Noche to approve. Also he said there were collars of filigree, and necklets set with green stones of the color of the creek where it turned over the falls at Leaping Water. There were cups of gold, and one particular goblet of chased work which an old king held between his knees, around the rim of which a matchless hunter forever pursued exquisite deer. The stem of it was all of honey-colored agate, and in the base there were four great stones for the colors of the four Quarters: blue for the North, green for the South where the wind came from that made the grass to spring, red for the Dawn side of earth, and yellow for the West. And for the same king there was a circlet for his brows, of fire-stones, by which I supposed he meant opals, half a finger long, set in beaten gold. Also there were lamps, jeweled and chased, on golden chains that hung a-light above the kings.

When then one of the children, who lay listening with his heels in the air, wished to know if it were true what his father had said, that there was evil in the Treasure which came out upon whoever so much as looked at it, there came a rueful blankness upon the face of old Noche.

“Ay,” said he, “and upon whoever so much as talks of it.” And he shook his neglected sling at them as though to have left it off for the sake of a story were a very culpable matter.

But the children would not have it like that at all. They flung themselves on him in a heap, and got upon his back and about his neck and rumpled his hair, declaring that he was the best old man that ever was, and he must tell them about the red necklace: till, growling a little, but very glad to be beguiled, Noche went on to say there was a necklace of red stones so splendid that every one of them was a little more splendid than the next one. Almost before he had begun and before Herman and I had heard anything louder than the unmeaning forest murmurs, we saw the children rise to attention, and scatter suddenly, with gay little splutters of laughter like the noise of water spilled along the ground. They disappeared down the trails that ran darkling among the rooted columns of the trees.

There was a certain dismay I thought on Noche’s face as he turned back to his work, perceiving that I had listened, and not sure how much I had understood. He began to talk to us at once about his work, as though that might have been the object of our attention. With his hand he reached out furtively behind him and destroyed all the patterns in the dust.

Still I found my mind going back to the story with some insistence. Up to that time I had seen no metal in the camp but some small pieces of hammered silver and simple tools of hard iron, and no ornaments but shells and berries. But there had been a relish in old Noche’s telling that hinted at reality. I remembered the pattern which he had pondered so secretly under the cypress trees, and it came into my mind in an obscure way, without my taking any particular notice of it, that this might be the pattern of the necklace of red stones. I had not time to think further then, for the sound to which the children had answered was the returning hunt and the Outliers coming toward us on the trail.

It was always so that they came together about the time that the blue haze and the late light rayed out long level bars across the hills. They would be awake and about at whatever hour pleased them, and take their nooning in whatever place. Through the days there would scarcely be so much seen of them as a woman beating fiber between two stones by a brook, or a man cutting fern on a steep slope. So still they were by use, and so habituated to the russet earth and the green fern and the gray stone, that they could melt into it and disappear. Though you heard close about you low-toned talk and cheerful laughter, you could scarcely, unless they wished it, come bodily upon them.

On this evening all those in the neighborhood of Deep Fern had come together, not only because of the news of House-Folk brought to camp, but because this was the time set for the return of Trastevera from some errand connected with the great occasion of which I had been told. It was she who had seen trouble walking with us on the trail from Broken Tree, and without whose advisement, so Evarra had already explained to me, nothing would be determined concerning Herman and me.

This Trastevera was also the wife of Persilope, and whatever the business that called her from Deep Fern that day, she was late returning. All the Outliers had come in. The light had left the lower reaches of the forest and began to shine level through the fan-spread boughs before Persilope came out of the grass walk where he had been pacing up and down restlessly. Advised by some sound or sense too fine for me, he lifted up his hand toward that quarter of the thick-set grove that fenced the far end of the meadow. In the quick attentiveness that followed on the gesture, he stood in the flush of rising tenderness until, with some others behind her, she came lightly through the wood. One perceived first that she was smaller than the others, most delicately shaped, and next, that the years upon her were like the enrichment of time on some rare ornament.

I do not know why in our sort of society it should always seem regrettable, when not a little ridiculous, for a woman to be ten years older than her husband. Since I have known the exquisite maturity of Trastevera’s spirit, tempering her husband’s passion to finer appreciation of her ripened worth, I have not thought it so. As she came lightly through the thick grass of the uncropped meadow there was, as often, a glow upon her that might have come from the business she had been abroad upon. It sustained her a little above the personal consideration, so that almost before she had recovered from the flush of her husband’s embrace, she turned toward Prassade—the red man who had found me in the wood—to say that all was as he would have wished it, and he had good reason for being pleased. This being apparently a word he had waited for, he thanked her with a very honest satisfaction. Then, with her hand still in Persilope’s, he looking down on her more rejoiced with having her back from her errand than with anything she had to say about it, she turned a puzzled, inquiring glance about the camp.

“Ravenutzi?” she questioned doubtfully; but the smith smiled and shook his head, and with one consent, as if she had answered expectation, the company parted and showed us to her where we stood. Without having any previous intention about it, I found myself rising to my feet to meet her, and heard Herman scramble lamely up behind.

She stood so, confronting us without a word for as long as it took Prassade briefly to explain how they had taken us, and why they had not done that to us which I already understood had threatened me on the first day of my captivity. This was long enough for me to discern that she was darker than the other Outliers, that her hair must have been about the color of Ravenutzi’s before it turned. Her eyes were gray and clouded with amber like the morning surf. She moved a step toward me, nodding her head to what the young chief said, and shaking it slowly to something in herself. Wonder and perplexity deepened in her. Delicately, as seeking knowledge of me and not realizing that I could understand her speech or answer in it, she drew the tips of her fingers across my breast. There was no more offensiveness in the touch than in the questioning fingers of the blind. Wonder and perplexity deepening still, she turned back to Persilope.

“I grow an old woman,” she said, “I have failed you.”

He took the hand which she put out deprecatingly, and held it strongly against his breast, laughing the full, fatuous man’s laugh of disbelief.

“When have you failed me?”

“I do not know,” she protested; “I cannot tell;” and I understood that the doubt referred to her failure to get from me by that contact, the clew she sought.

“Surely these are they whom I feared for you to meet when you set out for the sea by the cypresses. Not for what they would do to you”—her look was toward Persilope—“but for what they might bring to all Outliers. But now I am not sure.”

She spoke as much to the company at large as to her husband. The number of them had increased, until I could see the outer ring melting into the twilight of the trees, eyes in formless faces of amazement and alarm. Now at the admission of a difficulty, they all turned toward her with that courtesy of inward attention by which, when one of them would understand more of a matter than lay directly before him, each turned his thought upon the subject gravely for a time, like so many lamps lighted in a room, and turned it off again with no more concern when the matter was resolved. But even as she smiled to acknowledge their help she shook her head.

“No,” she repeated, “I cannot tell.” She turned and looked at me, and I gave her the look back with so deep a wish to have her understand that no trouble should come to them by me, that she must have sensed it, for her look went on by me and stopped at Herman.

“You?” she questioned.

“Tell her,” said Herman, who had not caught all the words, but only the general purport of her speech, “tell her that all we ask is to go to our own homes, unharmed and harming no one.”

Now that was not exactly what I had in mind, for though I would not for worlds have made trouble for the Outliers, I wished nothing so little as being sent away before I had got to know more of them. But before I could frame a speech to that end, Trastevera spoke again more lightly.

“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but kindness and well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that House-Folk should discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to pay them some little respect for it.”

She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment, but before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any matter of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a little to one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him pushed into the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in my mind that the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I had not before mentioned, might mean something. I hardly understood what.

I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance which the smith detected. While the words were in my throat he looked at me, subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had projected his personality forward until it filled satisfyingly all my thought. I no longer thought it worth while to mention where I had first seen Ravenutzi nor what I had found him doing. I was taken with a sudden inexplicable warmth toward him, and a vague wish to afford him a protection for which he had not asked and did not apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw that Trastevera had noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind had lain at the crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and been taken in the shadow.

“For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as though this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had better take counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at once, or be kept to await a sign.”

I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she had come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She shook her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly at the smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she walked slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then we were taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts.

The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of three half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the intervening hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the cupped space like the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad oaks and brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek that, dropping in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern, made a pool there, from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow. The upper basin, long and narrow, was named from the falls, Leaping Water.

The camp of the Outliers lay in one of the widest of the furrows between the ridges where the redwoods marched soldierly down to the stream side. Above it, between Deep Fern and a place called Bent Bow, lay Council Hollow. It was there, when the moon was an hour high, a battered-looking moon, yellow and low, went all the Outliers to consider what was to be done about us. It was a windy hollow, oval shaped, with long white knuckles of rock sticking out along the rim, where no trees grew, nothing taller in it than the shadows of the penstemon which the moon cast upon the rocks. Whenever the wind moved, there was a strong smell of sweet grass and yerba buena. There would have been about thirty men of the Outliers gathered when we came up the ridge from Deep Fern. We halted with the women at a point where we could see, near to one end, a little fire of crossed sticks low on the ground. The Outliers were at all times sparing of fire and cautious in the use of it.

The Council had been sitting some time, I think, upon other matters, when we took up our station on the rising ground. Trastevera went down, winding between the rocks toward the ruddy point of fire. The moon was moving in a shallow arc not high above the ranges, and some hurrying clouds scattered the light. We could see little more than the stir of her going, the pale discs of faces or the shining of an arm or shoulder in the clear space between the shadows of the clouds.

She went on quietly, all talk falling off before her until she stood in the small, lit circle between the leaders, who inquired formally of her had she anything to say of importance on the business of the two strangers.

“Only this,” she said, “that although I was greatly troubled before they came, by a sense of danger impending, I am now free from it so far as the House-Folk are concerned.”

“But do you,” questioned Prassade, “sense trouble still, apart from these?” He motioned toward Herman and me, who had been brought behind her almost to the circle of the flare.

“Trouble and shadow of change,” she said, and after a pause: “Shall I speak?”

Without waiting for the click of encouragement that ran about the Hollow, she began:

“You know all of you that I have, through no fault, the blood of the Far-Folk, which has been for a long time the blood of traitors and falsifiers. And yet never at any time have I played traitor to you nor brought you uncertain word, except”—I thought her voice wavered there—“in the matter of the hostage.”

If there had been any wavering it was not in the councillors, whose attention seemed to stiffen to the point of expectation as she went on steadily.

“When it was a question more than a year ago whether the Far-Folk should send us their best man and cunningest as a hostage for accomplished peace, you know that I was against it, though I had no reason to give, beyond the unreasoning troubling of my spirit. Later when Ravenutzi was brought into our borders, and I had met with him, there was something which sang to him in my blood, and a sense of bond replaced the presentiment. All of which I truly admitted to you.”

So still her audience was, so shadowed by the drift of cloud, that she seemed, as she stood with her face whitened by the moon, and the low fire glinting the folds of her dress, to be explaining herself to herself alone, and to admit the need of explanation.

“And because,” she said, “I could not be sure if it was a foreseeing, or merely my traitor blood making kinship to him, you took the matter to council and accepted the hostage. Are you sorry for it?”

At this, which had been so little anticipated, there went a murmur around the hollow as of doubt not quite resolved. Several cried out uncertain words which a ruffle of wind broke and scattered. Prassade wagged his red beard, shouting:

“No! By the Friend!”

“Then,” she went on, more at ease, I thought, “as it was with Ravenutzi, so with these. I saw trouble, and now I do not see it; trouble that comes of keeping them, or trouble of letting them go. That I cannot determine for you. So I say now, if you do not regret what you have done by Ravenutzi, do the same with these, accept and hold them, waiting for a sign.”

She left off, and the moon came out of the cloud to discover how they stood toward it, and went in again discovering nothing.

Then a man who had already pricked himself upon my attention, stood up to argue the matter. He was short and exceedingly stout of build. Above the thick bands of leather that protected his lower limbs, he wore no dress but a cougar skin bound about the thick columnar body and held in place by a cord passing over the shoulder. He was armed with a crotched stick that had an oblong pointed stone bound in the crotch by thongs, the handle of which was so long that, as he stood with his hands, which were wide and burned but shapely, resting upon it, the head of the weapon lay upon the ground. What was most singular in his appearance, as he stood blocked solidly against the half-lit sky, was his hair. It was pale yellow, crisp and curling, and rayed out erectly from his head as though it were the emanation of some natural force or property of the man, curiously and independently alive above the square and somewhat meaningless regularity of his countenance.

“Why,” inquired he, “were these House-Folk brought here to Deep Fern? Why not made to drink forgetfulness when first taken?”

“Evarra had forgotten the Cup,” Persilope explained; “she thought it could be gathered at Broken Tree, but she had forgotten how much further the season is advanced in that neighborhood.”

“But now,” said Evarra, “I have prepared it, and there is nothing more to do.” She came forward, and I observed that she held a wooden bowl against her breast from which steam arose, and an aromatic smell.

The moon had risen early on the track of the sun. The shallow lap of hills in which we stood gave directly westward to the belated glow that diffused through the moon shadows an amber bloom, in which, though the faces of the Outliers shone indistinctly, every motion and purpose was discernible. I could see then that Evarra’s purpose was to give Herman and me to drink of some herb which should cause us to forget all that had happened to us since we had crossed their borders at Broken Tree, and so send us home again. It met with so much approval that I spoke hurriedly to forestall it.

“No, no!” I cried. “We have done no harm to you that you should do so great a harm to us. If you must send us away, why, send us, and we will give you our word, and that is the best thing we have to give, that no one shall know of what has happened these four days. But do not take away the recollection from us.” I spoke so earnestly and meant so much what I said, taking Herman’s hand so as to include him in the vehemence of my request, though I do not think he had any particular feeling at the time, that I made some way with them.

“Nothing is farther from our thoughts,” I said, seeing Evarra hesitate, “than to bring harm upon you. Not for the world would we betray your ways nor your homes nor your treasure——”

I do not know why I should have mentioned treasure, except that seeing old Noche’s flowing head outlined against the pale luminosity of the sky that instant, brought it to my mind. The word popped out on my tongue as suddenly as it had popped in. Instantly there was a sharp crackling of exclamations and a stir as of people rushing together when a brand has snapped out of the fire, followed by a portentous stillness. Into this bay of sound the red-pointed beard of Prassade projected itself.

“Who,” he cried, “has been telling of treasure in the hearing of House-Folk?”

“No one, no one,” I protested, anxious not to provoke blame; “it is only that I overheard the children——”

“It was I,” admitted Noche regretfully, “old fool that I am. I was telling the children, and I did not think she understood so much.”

“Fool!” said Prassade; “and twice fool for being an old one!”

But Persilope corrected him.

“At the time of the Wardship it is permitted to tell the children of the King’s Desire and the keeping of it.”

“But not in the presence of House-Folk,” Prassade insisted, “nor by one who thinks there is no harm in a jewel if only it shines well and has a story to it.”

There was more to this which the wind broke and carried away, arms lifted and heads cast up within the shadow, turbulence and murmurs of denial. I heard Trastevera say, half to herself:

“Trouble come indeed, when one Outlier calls another a fool in open council.”

“It is nothing,” whispered Evarra at my shoulder, “all this talk. Though you had the King’s Desire in your hand, yet you would stay if Persilope thought she wished it.”

Then the yellow head of Mancha crinkled in the circle of the fire, his face under it grotesquely blocked with light, like some ancient mask, crying:

“Signs—do we wait for Signs? Here is a Sign: first the woman comes, and then the man seeking her. Now, if they are not returned speedily to their own place who may not come looking for the two of them? And if, being kept, they escape by chance and go back talking of treasure——”

“But a Sign!” cried Persilope, interrupting him. “Outliers, here is a Sign. These House-Folk have found us in a place where none of their kind so much as mark our trails. Within a day after being in our camp they have heard of the King’s Desire, and talked openly of it. This is a Sign that they are more favored by the Friends of the Soul of Man than any of their kind. Is it not a Sign?”

We could see men rising to their feet here and there, and some cried out: “A Sign! A Sign!” And then other broken phrases, torn and trumpeted by the wind. Persilope took the bowl from Evarra, holding it out over the fire with a motion to extinguish the dying flame.

“One has seen strangers coming, and strange things have come; shall we not wait upon her word?” he cried. I could make nothing of the confused murmur which ringed the hollow. Persilope must have read acquiescence in it, for he partially emptied the contents of the bowl upon the fire and then passed it to Mancha, Ward of the Outer Borders, to see what he would do. Mancha, smiling, handed the cup to Trastevera as a sign of unbroken confidence; she, as I guessed, so accepting it. That was the last I saw of her before Evarra hurried me away, holding high the bowl, slowly pouring the ceremonial water, silvered by the moon.

IV
THE MEET AT LEAPING WATER

Within five days, during which it rained and cleared, a fine long growing rain that left the world new washed and shining, the Meet of the Outliers was moved to Leaping Water.

This was the amphitheater of the terraced basin lying next above Deep Fern, and took its name from the long leap of the creek that came flashing down arch by arch from the high, treeless ridges. Five leaps it took from Moon-Crest to the Basin, where it poured guttering, in so steep a channel that the spray of it made a veil that shook and billowed with the force of its descending waters. It trailed out on the wind that drove continually, even on the stillest days, between the high wings of the mountain, and took the light as it traveled from east to west and played it through all its seven colored changes. It was like a great pulse in the valley, the throb and tremble of it, flushing and paling. The Basin was clear meadow land, well-flowered, close set by the creek, but opening well under the redwoods, with here some sunny space of shrubs, and there stretching up into the middle region of white firs dozing on the steeps above the water.

It was here we began to learn about the Love-Left Ward which was the occasion of their coming together.

The very first I heard of it was from Evarra’s slim lad, Lianth, who, when he was sent to keep me company, would lie on the fern, propping his chin upon his hand, and sing to me in his reedy unsexed voice, of a maiden who had left loving for the sake of a great service to her tribe. Then plucking up the brown moss by the roots, examining it carefully, he would ask me if I thought it was really right for a girl to do that sort of thing.

“What sort?”

“Give up loving and all her friends, boys she’s always—liked, you know, and keep a Ward, like Zirriloë.”

“Did she do that?”

“Well, they chose her to be the Ward this year, and her father let her. I don’t think he ought!”

“Why not?”

Lianth was not very clear on this point, except as it involved the masculine conception of beauty as the sign of a real inward preciousness. Zirriloë had a way of walking, like a wind in a blooming meadow, she had a cheek as soft, as richly colored, as the satin lining of unripened fir cones which he broke open to show me. Therefore Prassade shouldn’t have let her forswear all loving for ten years.

“She can’t even look at a boy,” said Lianth; “only at old men, Noche and Waddyn and Ravenutzi, and if there was—anybody—had thought of marrying her, he’d have to give up thinking about it for ten years. And anyway, what is the good of giving a girl secrets to keep if you have to watch her night and day to see that she keeps them?”

There was a great deal more to this which Herman learned from the men and the girl’s father. Prassade, whose eldest child she was, felt himself raised to immeasurable dignity by the choice of Zirriloë, who was in fact all that Lianth reported her, and more. To his pride it was a mere detail that during the ten years of her Wardship she was to live apart from all toward whom her heart moved her, kept by old, seasoned men, who never left her except with others older and less loverly than themselves. These six months past she had been with her watchers in a lonely place, learning by trial what it meant to have left all love to become the Ward of mysteries.

It was there Trastevera had been when I first saw her, to examine the girl and discover if her mind was still steadfast.

So she found it, and so reported it to Prassade, and all things being satisfactory, the feast of the Love-Left Ward was to take place on the fifth day from this. When her term was done the Ward took the Cup, and so forgetting all she had heard, returned to the normal use of women.

“But,” I said to Lianth, once when we were gathering elderberries by the creek, “what is it all about, this secret which Zirriloë must keep, and is not trusted in the keeping?”

“Ah!” he exclaimed impatiently, kicking at the mossy stones in the water-bed. “Ask Noche—he is one of the keepers.”

I should have taken that advice at once, but Noche was away at the Ledge, or River Ward, or wherever the girl was, and Evarra was much too busy to talk. Practically all the Outliers were expected at Leaping Water, and there was a great deal to do. As to how many there were of them, and what places they came from, I could never form any idea, since outside of Council Hollow they never came together in the open. At the fight at River Ward there were forty picked men, slingsmen and hammerers, but counting women and children there must have been quite four times that number at Leaping Water. They ran together like quail in the wood, and at a word melted like quail into its spacious silences.

There was that subtle essence of rejuvenation in the air that comes after rain. Buds of the incense shrub were swelling and odorous. All the forest was alive and astir with the sense of invisible friendly presences and low-toned happy talk that seemed forever at the point, under cover of a ruffling wind or screening rush of water, of breaking into laughter.

We came often upon lovers walking in the high arched aisles, children scuttling pink and unabashed in the dappled water, or at noons, men and women half sunk in the fern deep in gossip or dozing. Such times as these we began to hear hints by which we tracked a historic reality behind what I had already accepted heartily, and Herman with grudging, the existence of the King’s Desire.

They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown redwood litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them. Then one would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless tune, all of dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by the weight of jewels, and another would answer with a song about a lovely maid playing in sea caves full of hollow light.

By this we knew the thoughts of all of them ran on the story which held the songs together like a thread. We discovered at last that it was the history of the place from which they had come to Outland, bringing the Treasure with them, pursued by the Far-Folk. Or perhaps it was they who were the pursuers, but the Treasure had been the point of their contention, and it had cost the Outliers so much that they had come to abhor even the possession of it. So having buried it, they made their honor the keeping of the secret. Because the first disturbance over it that reft them from their country had been brought about by the treachery of a woman, they put a woman to the keeping, half in irony, I think, for then they had set a watch upon the woman.

It was about this time that Herman waked to an interest on the occasion that nothing else had been able to arouse in him. He thought that a community which had arrived at the pitch of understanding that the best thing to be done with wealth was to get rid of it, would repay study. I remember his wondering if the Outliers had had any more trouble with their Treasure, or what they imagined as such, for he never would credit its reality, than we had experienced with the Coal Oil Trust. I paid very little attention to him, for all my mind was occupied in watching Ravenutzi.

From the first I had noticed that whenever there was one of those old tales, or any talk of the King’s Desire, something would spring up in his face, as slight as the flick of an eyelid or the ripple of muscles at the corner of his mouth, but something at which caution snapped wide-awake in me. I recall how once we lay all together at the bottom of the wood in the clear obscure of twilight, in a circular, grassless space where the water went by with a trickling, absent sound. One of the young men began to sing, and Ravenutzi had stopped him with some remark to the effect that the Outliers could sing it so if it pleased them, but the story as it was sung was not true.

“Come,” said the youth, “I have always wanted to know how the Far-Folk told that part of the tale so as not to be ashamed of it.” Prassade sprang up protesting that there should be no communication between them and the Hostage on a forbidden matter. Some debate followed among the elders as to that. I could see the smith sitting in his accustomed attitude, knees doubled, hands clasped about them, his chin resting on his knees. The eyes were black in the twilight under the faun’s profile and the streaked, springy hair, yet always as if they had a separate furtive intelligence of their own. It occurred to me suddenly, that in this very debate precipitated by Ravenutzi, the Outliers were talking about the Treasure, and that he did not care in what fashion so long as they talked. Instinctively as I felt this, turning in my mind like a weed in the surf, I looked toward Trastevera as one turns in a dim room toward the light, holding out my mind to her as to one of better sight. I caught the eyes of Ravenutzi, the iris, opaque and velvety, disappearing under the widening pupil of his fixed gaze. I felt the rushing suggestion back away from the shore of my mind and leave it bare. There was something I had meant to speak to Trastevera about, and I had forgotten what it was.

It was brought back to me the next day, which was the one before the move to Leaping Water. We were sitting in Evarra’s hut, Herman and I, with Noche, for the wind and cloud of the Council had contrived to blow up a rain that drummed aloud on the bent fern but scarcely reached us through the thick tent of boughs. Above us we could hear the wind where it went hunting like a great cat, but down at the bottom of the pit of redwoods it could scarcely lift the flap of the door.

And without some such stir or movement of life within, one might have passed a trail’s breadth from the house of Evarra and not suspected it, so skillfully was it contrived within one of those sapling circles that spring up around the decayed base of ancient redwoods, like close-set, fluted columns round a ruined altar. Every family had two or three such rooms, not connected, not close together, but chosen with that wild instinct for unobtrusiveness with which the Outliers cloaked the business of living. From the middle of one of these, smoke could go up through the deep well of green and mingle undetected with the blue haze of the forest. Deep within, tents of skin could be drawn against the rain which beat upon them with a slumberous sound and dripped all down the shouldering colonnade.

The tent was half drawn this morning, and no drops reached us, but seldom, light spatterings from high, wind-shaken boughs. Evarra was abroad looking after her family, and Noche had come over with Herman to sit housed with me. The Outliers had, from such indifferent observation as they had made, got the notion that House-Folk were of great fragility as regards weather. They were exceedingly careful of us, though I had seen Noche laugh as he shook the wet from his body, and take the great gusts of wind as a man might the moods of his mistress. He sat opposite us now on a heap of fern, busy at his sling-plaiting, with the placidity of a spinning Hercules, and in a frame to be entertaining. It occurred to me it might be an excellent time to beguile him into talk of the Treasure, much to Herman’s annoyance, for he was of the opinion that my having been a week among the Outliers and no harm having come of it, was no sign it wouldn’t come eventually.

“Don’t meddle with their tribal mysteries,” he protested; “if it hadn’t been for their confounded Treasure we would have been on the trail for home by now.”

“But consider,” I explained to Herman for Noche’s sake; “if we drink Forgetfulness at the last, what does it matter how much we know before? And besides, he is suffering to tell me. Go on, Noche.”

Once you had old Noche started, his talk ran on like the involute patterns he loved to trace upon the sand, looping to let in some shining circumstance or set off some jewel of an incident. It was a wonderful treasure by his account: lamps thick with garnets, crusted with amethysts, and the cup of the Four Quarters which a dead king held between his knees.

Outside we could hear the creaking of the boughs as the wind pounced and wallowed, stalking an invisible prey. Within the hut we saw in the old man’s story, the summer island from which the tale began, far southward, rising from the kissing seas. All at once he left off, breathing quick, his nostrils lifted a little, quivering, his head turning from side to side, like a questing dog’s. We had heard nothing but the trickle of rain down the corrugated trunks, but Noche, turning his attention toward the doorway, twitched his great eyebrows once, and presently broke into smiling.

“Trastevera,” he said; and then a very curious thing happened. Some patches of the red and brown that had caught my attention from time to time at the burl of the redwood opposite stirred and resolved into Ravenutzi. How long he had been there I had no notion. Though I was well acquainted with that wild faculty of the Outliers to make themselves seem, by very stillness, part of the rock and wood, I was startled by it quite as much on this occasion as on the first time of my meeting him. It was not as though Ravenutzi made himself known to us by a movement, but drew himself out of obscurity by the force of his own thinking. The fact of his being there seemed to shoulder out all question as to why he was there in the first place. He was looking, with that same curious fixity that held me when I caught him dyeing his hair at the spring, not at me, but at Trastevera approaching on the trail. She came up the trail in that lifting mood with which the well body meets weather stress, as if her spirit were a sail run up the mast to catch the wind. She came lightly, dressed as the women mostly were, in an under tunic of soft spun stuff, of wood green or brown color, but her outer garment was all of the breasts of water birds, close-fitted, defining the figure. She looked fairly back at Ravenutzi as she came, smiling from below her quiet eyes. He walked on past her so casually that only I could say that he had not merely been passing as she passed. But I was sure in my own mind he had been sitting close by Evarra’s hut for a long time.

She gave us Good Friending as she came in, but it was not until Noche, in response to a sign from her, had taken Herman out by the brook trail, that she spoke to me directly.

“If you made a promise to me in regard to your being here and what you shall see among us, would he, your friend, be bound by it?”

“Well, in most particulars; at any rate, he would give it consideration.”

“Does he love you?”

“No,” I said. I was sure of that much.

“How do you know?”

“By the best token in the world. He has told me so.”

“Ah!” She looked at me attentively a moment, as if by that means she might discover the reason.

“Then in that case he will probably do as you say. If he loved you,” she smiled, “he would expect you to do as he said.”

She loosened her feather coat, shaking out the wet, and took from Evarra’s wall an oblong piece of cloth, brown and yellow barred like the streakings of sunlight on the bark of pines, and disposed it so that, with the folds lying close and across the slender body and the two loose ends falling over the shoulders, she looked like some brooding moth that bides the rain under a sheltering tree.

“You are so much more like us,” said she, “than I would have expected; so much more understanding. Have you Far-Seeing?”

“How Far-Seeing?”

“There are some among us,” she said, considering, “who can lie in their beds at night and hear the deer crossing at Lower Fern; some who can stand in their doors and see the face of a man moving on the cliffs at Leaping Water. But I am one who can see trouble coming before the bearer of it has reached Broken Tree. Have you such?”

“I have heard of them.”

“Do you know then if they see better or worse, for loving?”

I could not tell her that, though I wished to, since she made such a point of it. I had to content myself with asking her how it was with herself.

“Very much better,” she laughed, and colored; “or worse.” She frowned, sighing. “I will tell you how that is.”

“When I was just grown,” said Trastevera, “I was chosen to be—to fulfill a certain duty which falls every ten years to some young woman of the tribe. It was a duty which kept my heart occupied so that there was no time for loving or being loved. I was much apart and alone, and it was then that my Gift came to me, the gift of Far-Seeing. It served the tribe on many occasions, particularly on one when we were at war with the Far-Folk. I saw them breaking through at River Ward, and again I saw them when they tried to get at us from the direction of the sea——But it was not of that I meant to tell you. After I was released from my duty I had planned because, because——” She seemed to have the greatest difficulty getting past this point, which for so direct a personality as hers was unusual. I gathered that the matter was involved in the tribal mysteries which Herman had warned me to avoid, so I could not help her much with questioning.

“Because of a certain distinction which they paid me, I had planned,” she went on at last, “to have no love and no interest but theirs. It came as a shock to me when Persilope was made Warden of the Council, to find that it was agreed on every side that I should marry him.”

“Didn’t you love him then?” I was curious to know.

“I scarcely knew him, but I knew what he was, and if it was thought best for me to love him, I wished, of course, to do what was best. And Persilope wished it also.”

“You could do that? Love, I mean where you were told to love.” Somehow the idea filled me with a strange trepidation.

“If the man was love worthy, why not?” She was surprised in her turn. “So long as my heart was not yet given, it was mine to give where the Outliers would be best served by it. Do you mean to say,” she asked, sensing my incredulity, “that it is not so with the House-Folk? Do you not also serve the tribe most?”

“With our lives and our goods,” I admitted.

“But not with your loving? But if you love only to yourselves, is not the common good often in peril from it?”

“Often and often,” I agreed. Suddenly it began to seem a childish and ineffectual thing that we should be in the most important issues of life so at the mercy of place and incident, obscuring coquetries and tricks of dress.

“Sometimes it is so with us,” she agreed, “but not with people like myself and Persilope. When it was brought to our notice how all the Outliers would be benefited by our uniting his practical sense with my far-seeing, we held our hearts out like a torch and lighted each from each.” They could do that it seemed, these Outliers, apt full natures, they could rise in the full chord of being and love without other inducement than the acknowledgment of worth. That was why the Outliers took no notice of what I was secretly ashamed of having noticed, that she was years older than her husband.

Leaving the habits of the House-Folk, Trastevera went on with her narrative.

“We have a custom when we are married,” she said, “of choosing where it shall be. We set forth, each from his own home, all our friends being apprised of what we are about to do and wishing us well. Then we come to the place, each by his own trail, meeting there under no eyes. When a month is done we go home to our friends, who make a great to-do for us. There is a hill I know, looking seaward, a full day from here. There are pines at the top and oaks about the foot, but the whole of it is treeless, grassy, with flowers that sleep by day among the grasses. It is neither windy nor quiet, but small waves of air run this way and that along the grass, and make a changing pattern. Here I chose to meet Persilope. All day I went down by Deer Leap and River Ward to meet my man, and he came up by Toyon and the hiving rocks to meet me. All day I felt him come, and the earth felt him: news of him came up through the grasses and touched my finger-tips.” She flushed a little, and finished simply: “When we came back,” she said, “I had reason to believe I had lost the gift of Far-Seeing. It was while we were away that the Far-Folk had opened the matter of the hostage, and the Council waited for Persilope to come back from his wedding to decide what was best to be done. The people were for the most part glad to put an end to quarreling.”

This was the first time that I realized that there was another sort of woodlanders beside the Outliers. Up till this time, when I had heard mention of Far-Folk, I thought it perhaps another sort of name for us, House Livers, as they called us indifferently, or Diggers, or They of the Ploughed Lands, as people will speak of a wild species, very common but of too little interest to be named or known.

“So soon as I had heard of the Far-Folk’s plan to send us their smith as a perpetual hostage,” she went on, “I was chilled with prescience of disaster, and said so freely. But when Ravenutzi came to council, and I had looked him through, I was warm again. You heard how I said last night that I could not tell if it was the blood of the Far-Folk playing traitor in me, or if there was, in fact, no shadow coming. So I was obliged to say to the Council, and they on their own motion, without any help from me, accepted him. No one has blamed me”—she mused a little, with her chin upon her hand—“but ever since I have been afraid. There might really have been some intimation of coming evil which my happiness, going from me to everything I looked upon, dispelled as a bubbling spring breaks up a shadow.”

She rose and walked from me a little space, returned, and stood before me so intent upon getting some answer more than my words, that I thought it best to let no words trouble her. Presently she went on:

“Since then I have had no serious forecasting that concerned the Outliers at large. But some days before Prassade first found you, I had a vision of Broken Tree and a bird rising from it crying trouble. There was shadow lying on my world, and dread of loss and change. But this is the strangest thing of all. When I had seen you I saw more than that. Between you and Ravenutzi there was some bond and understanding.”

“No, no!” I protested; “on his part, yes, some intention toward me, some power to draw me unaware to meet some end of his. And yet....”

“And yet you like him?”

I admitted it. Though I had no special confidence in his purpose, I felt my soul invite his use.

“And that,” said Trastevera, “is why I have kept you here and advised that you be told anything it is lawful for an Outlier to know. Ordinarily when we find House-Folk among us we give them the Cup and let them go. But since you are to drink forgetfulness at last, before that happens you may be of use to me.”

“But how?”

Though I had more curiosity than concern, I could see doubt pulsing in her like the light breathing of a moth. She resolved at last.

“Even if you betray me, there is still the Cup,” she said. “You have already been of use to me, for as I came into camp last night I felt the shadow; it was not on you when I looked, but when Ravenutzi looked at you I saw it fall, and it fell from him.”

She considered me attentively to see what I would make of this, but not willing to say until I had considered it myself, I spoke of the Cup; beginning to take it seriously for the first time.

“Of what,” said I, “will it make me forgetful?”

“Everything at first, but by degrees the past will clear. Only around all that happens here, and around the circumstance of your drinking it, there will be the blank of perfect sleep.”

“But why are you so sure in sparing me, that I shall be able to serve you?”

“How could you help it?” She looked at me in quick surprise. “You are not like your friend is who says this is good or not good, and that is the end of it. You are one in whom the vision clouds and colors. By the color of your mind when it falls under Ravenutzi’s I shall learn perhaps whether to trust my old distrust of him or my present friendliness.

“Oh!” she cried, perceiving so readily at that instant the half conviction, half credulity, of my mind toward her that she was embarrassed by it. “Is it so among House-Folk that they must always explain and account for themselves? If I said to an Outlier that he could help me he would not have questioned it.”

“But what am I to do?”

“Hold the will to help me. Be friends with the smith if he is friendly, and say nothing of this to any one but me. When your time comes to take the Cup I will see that it is made light for you.”

It did not sound very difficult, and perhaps I did not take it very seriously; at any rate I gave the promise. Trastevera unwinding herself from the striped cloth like a moth coming out of a chrysalis, resumed her feather coat and left me with that suddenness I had learned to expect of the Outliers, like a bird flitting or a weasel slipping in the chaparral.

On the very first occasion of our being alone together after that I demanded of Evarra what Trastevera had meant by saying that she was of the blood of Ravenutzi, and that the blood was traitorous. I could ask that safely, because I had learned that, except in the one important matter of the Treasure, the Outliers had no skill in concealments and no knowledge whatever of indirection. It was as if somewhere in their history they had so sickened of the stuff of treachery that their teeth were set on edge at the mere attitudes of it, tricks, pretensions and evasions.

So I knew that if I opened a forbidden matter, Evarra would tell me so flatly, and that would be the end of it. And if it was permissible to speak at all, she would do me no such discourtesy as not to speak freely.

It was a very old affair, she said, but one well known among the Outliers. In one of their quarrels with the Far-Folk one of their own women was taken and kept. Afterward she had been returned to her home by purchase, and had had a child shortly after, begotten upon her unwillingly by one of the Far-Folk. From that child Trastevera was descended. The blood of the Far-Folk, said Evarra, was a foul strain, but they had mixed it with the best of theirs, and there was no more treason left in it than there was soiling of last season’s rains in the spring that watered Deep Fern. None of the Outliers had even remembered it until Ravenutzi came. As for these Far-Folk, they were to the Outliers all that cat was to dog, hill-dwellers, seeking treeless spaces, holes in the rock and huts of brush; wiry folk, mocking and untruthful. But they were such inveterate craftsmen that a man of them could sooner smudge himself at a forge making a knife to trade you for a haunch of venison, than go a-hunting for his meat himself. It was so most of the iron implements I had noticed had been circulated among the Outliers. For their part they preferred casting themselves joyously forth on the day to come back well furnished by their own hands.

But a man of the Far-Folk would sit all day with his nose to a bit of hammered metal, graving on it strange patterns of beasts and whorls and lacing circles. When it was done, said Evarra, there was no great pleasure in it, for it would not glitter as a bit of shell, nor brown nor brighten as a string of berries, nor be cast every hour in a new pattern like a chaplet of flowers, but remained set forever, as the Far-Folk in their unkempt ways.

They were piliferous too, and lived in such relation as weasels might to the people of the Ploughed Lands; by which term she always spoke of the few farmers whose homesteads I could occasionally see from Outland. The Far-Folk would go down by night across the borders of the Outliers to the farmyards for their scraps of metal, and ate fruit from the orchards. It was to purchase free passage for such expeditions through disputed territory that they had given hostage to their foes at Deep Fern; free leave to go and come from Deer Leap to the River Ward, and between Toyon and Broken Head. Up to this time the compact had been scrupulously kept, though it was evident from Evarra’s manner of admitting it, she begrudged any good opinion I might have of the Far-Folk on that account.

“And what harm have you had from Ravenutzi?”

Ah, that was as might be, if you counted the failure of Trastevera’s visions and his making a fool of old Noche with his smith’s tricks. The old man had thought of little this year past but forge work and designs—and prating to the children of the King’s Desire. “If it had been my child listening to him,” finished Evarra, “I should have smacked him.”

All of which I told to Herman at the first opportunity. And also that I should never be happy one moment until I had found out what fact, if any, lay behind the story of the King’s Desire.

“What’s the good of finding out,” said Herman gloomily, “if we have to take their everlasting dope on top of it?”

“And within three days of the most sophisticated society on earth,” I reminded him. “They are having the golf tournament at Mira Monte this week. Could you believe it?”

“Oh, I don’t believe a word of it,” he insisted. “This is just one of the tales you’ve made up, and you’ve hypnotized me into going through with it, but I don’t believe it at all.”

V
THE LOVE-LEFT WARD

I was sitting under a toyon tree watching Evarra brew forgetfulness in a polished porphyry bowl, when Herman came by. It was the morning of the Meet. The Cup was wanted for her who was the Ward, and Evarra took a great deal of pains with the brew, heating the bowl slowly and, when the dry leaves began to smoke and give off an odor of young fir, dropping water gently and setting it to steep in the sun. I had hoped to discover what plant it might be, but there was little to be guessed except that it had a blue flower taken in the bud, and smelled like a wood path in the spring. Evarra sat and stirred under the toyon and answered my questions or not as she was inclined.

“Do you know any sort of an herb, Evarra, that will turn gray hair black again?”

“That I do; and black hair gray if you wish it.” But I had not caught the significance of her statement, when Herman came along, bursting full of news. He was looking almost handsome that morning, for he had put on the dress of the Outliers for the first time, and though he had managed it so as to cover more of his skin than was their fashion, it became him very well. Some satisfying quality streamed from him, according with the day. As if he had laid off something besides the dress which had come between him and the effect I had wished him to have on me.

“Come up the trail with me; I have some news for you,” he began. “May she?”

This last was to Evarra. With all the basin of Deep Fern and Leaping Water full of their own folk we had been allowed to move freely about among them, but there was still a form of keeping us under guard.

“Go up,” said Evarra, probably glad to get rid of me, “as far as Fallen Tree, where you can see the Leap between that and the clearing. I will join you presently. You can see the procession best from there, when it first comes out of the wood.”

The dew was not yet gone up from the shadows nor the virgin morning warmed a whit toward noon; the creek sang at the curve, I felt the axles of the earth sing as it swung eastward. I spread out my arms in the trail and touched the tips of the growing things, and felt the tide of abundant life rise through my fingers. Herman strode in the trail ahead and called over his shoulder:

“What are you laughing at back there, Mona?”

“News,” I answered, for I had remembered suddenly something Trastevera had said to me.

“What news?”

“How should I know, except that it is good news? The meadowsweet told it to me. What’s yours?”

“That Treasure you’re so keen about; they’ve really got it. I’ve talked with men who’ve seen it.”

“Noche?”

“He hasn’t come back yet, but Waddyn, one of the keepers—there were four of them—dug it up ten years ago and reburied it.”

“But why?”

“That’s my news. On account of Trastevera. She was the Ward ten years ago, and they were afraid to give her their wretched drug lest they should destroy her gift of Far-Seeing, as they call it. So they took counsel and decided to change the hiding-place. Prassade said it wasn’t an altogether popular movement. Some of the Wards haven’t taken kindly to the Cup when their turn came, and they feared the precedent. But anyway they did it. They made a cordon round the place where it was hid, three days’ journeys wide, and the four old men went in and dug up the Treasure and buried it again.”

“All those jewels and beaten gold?”

“Whatever it is they’ve got, colored pebbles most likely. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Prassade says, changing the place of the Treasure; that has happened several times in their history. But while they had it up they had a look at it, and Noche’s head has been turned ever since.”

“I should think it might. It’s all true, then?”

“Folk tales, likely; all tribes have them.” Though his face was turned from me on the trail, I could feel Herman’s professional manner coming on again. “It is extraordinary, though, how their social organization is so nearly like to what you would expect of a highly civilized people thrown suddenly back on the primal environment. Take their notions of property now——”

What he was going to say must have been very interesting, but just at this point we came to Fallen Tree, and saw the irised banner of the Leap floating before its resounding crash of waters. A little spit of grassy land ran here from the clearing into the dense growth, and the trail entered by it. Beyond it, pale late lilies censed the shadows of the redwoods, and below in the meadow there was nothing fairer than the bleached, wind-blown hair of the children, as they ran and shouted through the scrub. Evarra came hurrying with the Cup against her breast. Prassade and Persilope took up a station of some prominence on the point opposite us, with Mancha behind them, leaning on his long weapon. Presently the flutes began.

The sound of them stole upon us softly from far within the redwoods, keyed a little under the bell tones of the creek, and rising through it to the pitch at which the water note seems forever at the point of breaking into speech. As the procession skirted the meadow, the music emerged in a tune fetching and human. Now you heard the swing of blossoms by runnels in the sod, the beat of spray on the bent leaves by the water borders; then the melody curling and uncurling like the ringlets on a girl’s neck. With the music some sort of pageant passed, boys and girls wreathed and dancing, forming as they wound in the wood glooms, breaking and dissolving where the trail led through the bright, sunned space of the meadow. We could hear from the Outliers ranged about the clearing, light applause of laughter like the patter that follows the wind in the quaking asp.

The pageant circled the open space around which rippled the curved blade of the creek, and came to halt behind Persilope and the Council. Then a drum-beat arose and rolled steadily, the four keepers came out of the wood; Noche and Waddyn and two others I did not know or observe, except that they were not young and carried the occasion solemnly. The keepers took up their station on either side of the meadow, and the two foremost, saluting, passed on a little beyond the chief. Into the hollow square thus formed for her, came the maiden Ward.

First as she stood there, one realized in her figure the springing pose of immaturity, in her gaze the wraptness and fixity of the devotee. Altogether she was of so exquisite a finish and delicacy that one would wish to have plucked her like a flower. She was dressed in a smooth, seamless bodice of tawny skin, baring the throat and rounded upper arm; below that a skirt of thin green was shaped to her young curves by the vagrant wind. Her hair, which was all of burnt gold, powdered with ashes of gold, was drawn loosely back and confined close to her head, but fell free to her hips, blown forward, defining her like the sheath of a flower. Her brows also were touched with gold and the eyes under her brows were like agate at the bottom of a brook.

She wore no jewels but a thread of scarlet berries that, in its revealing femininity, in the way it took the curve of her slender throat and ran into the little hollow between her breasts, so seemed to me as if I had never seen a more endearing ornament. As she appeared among us,—for though she had walked very quietly out of the forest there was that appealing quality of her loveliness which gave to her coming the swiftness of a vision,—as she appeared thus, a ring of smiling ran sensibly about the hushed, observing circle.

She moved in the exultation of her shining mood, unconscious of the way her feet went or what eyes were upon her, to the sound of the shallow drums and the delicate high flutes. As the music dropped she stopped before Persilope, who stood forward a little with some formal words of ritual or salutation. I missed the exact words, all my attention taken up with what had happened to Mancha. He had been standing just behind the chief, and in the brief interval while Zirriloë had come ten steps or so out of the shadow, he had passed, as though her beauty had been some swift, vivifying shock, from being a grave beholder to an active participant of the occasion. Deep red surged up in his face and left it pale again, his eyes, which were blue, burned amber points and took her like a flame. He shook as though the joints of his spirit were loosed, and took the full red under-lip in his teeth to keep back the tide of strength that came on him as he looked at her. His breath came purringly. I saw the soul of the man lithe and rippling in him, the glint of his eyes, the mass and thickness of his body incredibly lifted and lightened by the consciousness of the Mate. He did not know what had happened to him, but he laughed to himself his joy in her, as she moved wrapped in her high errand down the still summer glade, and across the meadow.

“Herman! Herman! Do you see?” I whispered.

He was sitting on the fallen tree next to me, and as I moved my hand toward him in that vague pang following quick on the shock of inexpressible beauty, I felt his fingers cold. His lips were open and I saw his tongue move to wet them, like a man unconsciously athirst.

Beyond the clearing, thick purplish trunks of the redwood upbore the masses of foliage like a cloud. The space between the first twenty feet or so of their gigantic columns was choked with laurel and holly and ceanothus, pierced by long tunnels that the deer had made. Down one of these the two foremost of the keepers plunged and were lost behind the mask of loose, wild vines that festooned the front of the wood, lifting and falling in the wind that by mid-morning began to set seaward from the high ridges.

But the girl, some ten steps behind them, still in her half-seeing mood, missed the moment of the out-streaming of the vines, checked and faltered. The wind caught her dress and wrapped her in it, the drapery of vines swung out and caught her hair. Before the other keepers could come up with her, the long arm of Ravenutzi reached out from his point of vantage on a heavy, slanting trunk and gathered up the offending vines, holding them high and guardedly until the girl could pass. The detention was slight, but long enough for the annoyance of it to have pierced her abstraction before he let the curtain fall almost on the heads of the hurrying keepers, long enough for her to have looked up at Ravenutzi and accord to him the first conscious recognition of her solemn passage. Whatever flattery there might have been in that, it could not draw so much as a backward glance from him. With the swish of the long vines flung back upon the wall of boughs, he sprang forward from his perch, and as if that action had been the signal, drew with him a ring of staring faces toward the grassy spit by which the trail entered the meadow.

The music, which during the ritual had melted into the undertone of forest sounds, emerged again more pointedly human and appealing. It summoned from the bluish glooms an interest so personal and touching that it drew the Outliers from the shy wildness of their ways. The ring of watchers surged forward a step, the music rose like a sigh of expectation and ushered in a group of women who, without any order or solemnity, but with a great and serious kindness, supported a young woman in their midst. It was she who had been the Ward and was now to receive forgetfulness.

As soon as I saw Trastevera, upon whose arm she leaned, I understood that these were the former Wards, come to afford her such comfort as their experience justified. It was not until I saw her mother hurry forward crying: “Daria! Daria!” that I began to realize what need of comfort there must be. Evarra beside me stirred the Cup. Its faint aromatic odor was of a cold and sickly dread, reflected from Daria’s widened eyes on some secret surface of myself.

She was a pretty girl, warm-tinted, eyes of a wet gray, the broad brow and sensitive short lip of women whose happiness centers in approval. It was easy to read in her face that of all the restrictions of her Wardship the one against loving had been hardest borne; plain to be seen now in the way she clung to her mother, who took the face between her hands, that of all the forfeitures that lay in the blue flower of forgetfulness, that one of loving was most difficult to pay.

“O mother, mother,” she said, “I cannot bear it!”

She shuddered sick, looking on all she had lived among and knowing that she might never know them again with that one of herselves which stood hesitating between the meadow and the wood. There was not one of all those trails, if she set foot in it to-morrow, that she would know where it went or what she might meet in it. She was to die in effect, to leave life and memory, to wake mutilated in the midst of full-blooded womanhood, without childhood, girlhood, parents, intimates.