Part 9

In the meantime it had occurred to me that I was not seeing as much of Ravenutzi as was implied in my promise to Trastevera. Besides, I thought it might be interesting to know what he thought of the redisposal of the King’s Treasure. I had followed the use of the Outliers up to this time in not speaking of it to him.

I was sitting between the roots of a redwood steeped in the warm fragrance and languor of a pine forest in the spring, when this notion occurred to me. The force with which this idea caught me might have arisen from Trastevera’s wishing it at that moment, or Ravenutzi’s being engaged on some business that made my presence advisable. Accordingly I looked for the smith in the accustomed places, where, in the fulfillment of his hostage, he made a point of being unobtrusively and contentedly about. He could be found oftenest with Noche, the only one of the men who afforded him an unaffronting companionship. But this morning I could not find him in the Fern, nor at his smithy under the fall, nor with the fishers at the creek. It was quite by accident that I came upon him some hours later sitting on a stump in an artificial clearing not much frequented by the Outliers, since it had been a hunters’ camp and had the man taint about it. As he sat turning over some small matters in his hand, his brow knitting and unknitting, the whole man seemed to bristle with some evil, anxious intent. If there had been flames jutting from him, green spitting flames from eye and brow, they could not have given to him an aspect more sinister and burning. The mobile tip of his nose twitched slightly, the full, gracile lips were drawn back, bracketed by deep, unmirthful lines. The whole personality of the man pulsed and wavered with the fury of his cogitations, which, when he looked up and saw me, he gathered up with a gesture and disposed of like a snake swallowing its skin.

From the moment that his eyes lighted on mine his look neither flinched nor faltered, but all the evil preoccupation of him seemed to retreat and withdraw under their velvet. His mood yielded, as it seemed to me he always did yield, gracefully to my understanding and the security of sympathy. He had been busy as I came up, with some bits of leaves and blossoms and sticks, all of special significance, by which the Outliers could communicate as well as by letter. He was tying them in a bundle, which, as soon as he saw me, he began to untie and scatter as though there had been no object in it but mere employment.

Seeing him set his foot on some shredded petals of a sentimental significance, I thought he might have been composing a message to some woman of his own, to her who had come to me at Leaping Water perhaps, and destroyed it as one tears verses written in secret. I was quite willing to help him from the embarrassment of being caught at such an occupation by falling in with his first suggestion.

“Come,” he said, making room on the stump beside him, “it is a good day for teaching you to be completely the Outlier that I believe you are at heart.”

He lifted a heap of twigs and flowers, chose a spray of laurel and berries of toyon, with two small sticks, one of which was carefully measured three-fourths of the length of the other.

“Now what does this say?”

“The toyon means courage, but taken with the laurel probably means a place where they grow together,” I answered, proud of knowing so much; “two things of the same kind mean time—two days—no, one day and three-quarters.”

“Say to-morrow at mid-afternoon.” Then he considered, and added a small feather. “And this?”

I was doubtful.

“Speed,” I hazarded.

He gave the two low, warning notes of the quail, and I clapped my hands, recognizing it as a quail’s feather.

“Be quick and cautious!”

He laughed encouragement, and then shyly, after some consideration, he bound them all together with a sprig of a vine that spells devotion, and stuck it in his girdle.

“See,” he declared, “you have sent me a message appointing a secret meeting, and I shall wear it openly to show that, old as I am, I am not too old to appreciate ladies’ favors.”

He roughed his streaked gray hair as he laughed again with a delicate whimsicality that took off the edge of offence.

“Sometimes, Ravenutzi, I think you are not so old as you look.”

“Ah, when?”

“Just now when I came upon you. And when they talk of the King’s Desire. From the way you look when they talk of selling it to secure the title to their land, I gather the Far-Folk won’t be very well pleased with that disposition.”

“Would you expect it, seeing that it belongs to us?”

“But does it?”

“Who but our fathers brought it from the Door of Death? It makes no difference with belonging that the Outliers have kept us out of our own so many years.”

“If it comes to that,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to me to belong to either of you.”

“It was ours in the beginning. Be sure it will come in the end to our hand again.”

“Was that what you were thinking about when I came up?”

“I suppose so. I often think about it. An ill subject for a good day.” He rose up to dismiss it. “Let us go and see if the spring is full.”

We went up through the tall timber through a chain of grassy meadows, little meadows planted fair with incense shrub and hound’s tongue and trillium. We nibbled sprigs of young fir, surprised birds at their mating and a buck pawing in the soft earth. I do not remember if the spring was full or not, but I recall very well that as we came back skirting the edge of under-grown forest, stiff with stems like a wall, Ravenutzi made a great to-do because he had lost my token. That was singular to me, because a little time before when he helped me over a bog I had seen it sticking quite firmly in the crossing of his girdle. He would not go back to look for it, insisted rather that we should go around by the Laurel Bank where toyon grew, and gather its belated berries to make another. So being very gay about it, and laughing a great deal, we got back to camp with Ravenutzi’s belt stuck full of laurel and toyon, the last hour of the morning. This was about the time the treasure diggers, setting three of their party on the faint trail they had found, turned back toward Deep Fern.

They arrived about two hours before sunset, went straight to Persilope, talked with him apart, remained otherwise separate and uncommunicable. Already some invisible warning of their approach ran about the basin and drew the Outliers in from whatever business they were abroad upon. They came hurrying and crowding into the long narrow meadow between the creek and the wood, fluttered and full of questioning. The unexpected return of the party, empty handed, the lessening of their number, their grave silences, Noche’s distracted appearance, Mancha’s head held high, Prassade’s hung down; all these kept enquiry and supposition rife.

The wood began to resound with calls, which were answered from far and near as the belated ones came hurrying from fishing and hunting and isolated huts. In the middle meadow the treasure hunters sat together on the ground. Persilope walked up and down. Around the edge of the wood ran the whisper and jostle of fresh arrivals. Now and then Persilope took note of them, awaiting the last impatiently for the time to speak. The sun traveled seaward, and the fan-spread, vaporous rays of blueness ranged through the redwoods and melted into twilight. The noise of coming fell off by degrees, and every man began to count and question to know for whom they waited. It appeared the Maiden Ward was still abroad. She had gone that afternoon with the one keeper and two women to the ridge behind Deep Fern to dig certain roots for dyeing. She was late returning. Two or three stars had come out in the twilit space when far back under the redwoods there was the sound of a man running. The _pad, pad_ of his feet on the thick needles drew near, burst upon us, cleared the ring of listeners and carried the man full into the open, gasping and panting.

“Gone! Gone!” he shouted. “Lost! Seized and stolen!”

The words, sharp and startling, brought all the sitters to their feet like the cracking of a whip.

“Who? Who, and where?” cried Prassade, taking the man, who was the fourth keeper, by the shoulders and wheeling him round face to face. “Is it my daughter? What have you done with her?”

“Gone!” he declared again in the midst of panting.

“Of her own will? When? In what direction?” With every question Prassade shook him as if he would have jolted the answer out of him in default of words.

“Let me breathe. Just now. I came as fast as I could. Not of her own will, I think. There were others—one other.”

The man struggled with his agitation. Persilope counseled patience; the hearers closed round him in a ring, as he grew more coherent.

They were out, he said, on sodden ground along the foot of the Laurel Bank, he and the two women digging roses. Zirriloë strayed along the lower edge of the Bank. There was a toyon bush, full berried, grown up among the laurels, and she gathered the scarlet clusters for her hair.

She had been a long time pushing close among the branches, reaching for the handsomest berries, some thirty paces from them, but never out of sight. They could see her dress among the leaves. Yes, they were all sure of that. He could not say how long it was before it occurred to them as strange that she should stand there so long in the toyon. Nor how long after that it dawned upon them that it was not she but her dress which they looked at hanging there in the chaparral, stirred by the wind. One of the women went to look, and found the Ward’s outer garment stuck shoulder high among the branches. They thought it a prank at first, bent back the boughs, peering and calling. Beyond the close outer wall of foliage the thicket was open enough for careful passage. They pushed into the thickest stems, suspecting her in ambush. One of the women some paces ahead, beginning to be annoyed, searching rapidly, spied something slipping from hollow shade to shade. She made an exclamation of discovery which changed to fright as a man shot out from the laurels in front of her and disappeared. They had all seen him crouching and running under the low branches up the slope.

They had spent little time after that looking about them. It was already dusk in the chaparral. The speaker had left the women behind, and come on rapidly to send some one younger on the darkling trail. He turned toward the girl’s father as he spoke, as being naturally the most interested. I could see Prassade’s face set and harden with the narrative, the line of his mouth thinning. Now it widened to let out two sharp questions.

“Did you see any sign of struggle or capture?”

“Not a leaf disturbed, not a twig broken, but indeed we went only a little way——”

“What sort of a man was it?”

“He was dressed as an Outlier.”

“Ah!” The trap of Prassade’s lips went shut again, he had got what he waited for.

“But you did not think him one?” It was Persilope took up the question.

“It was very dark under the laurels; he ran fast.”

“Was he Far-Folk?”

“So the woman thought.”

I could see in the dusk the lift of Prassade’s shoulders, and the slight inclination of his palms outward. He had had all that day and the night for wondering what his daughter’s part in the theft of the treasure might have been. Perhaps—who knew?—some unadmitted fact had gone to the shaping of his conclusion. He turned to Persilope, and his voice cracked with hardness.

“It seems to me,” he said, “we have affairs more important than the flight of a dishonored girl.”

“No, by the Friend!” cried a man, one of those who had gone with the Treasure party. “It seems to me that it is all one affair, and we shall find the girl when we find the King’s Desire. They have gone together.”

At this, which was the first announcement of the loss so plainly intimated by the demeanor of the party, there ran a sound of unbelief and bewilderment around the camp.

“Gone!” they cried, and “Gone! The King’s Treasure!” in every accent of incredulity and surprise.

“Ay, gone,” said Prassade, “seized, stolen away,” unconsciously repeating the words of the keeper, “gone with my honor and the faith of the Outliers.”

While the keeper told his story the listeners, in the manner of crowds, surged forward, closing between him and the dispirited Treasure party. At Prassade’s admission of his dishonor, they were disrupted suddenly by sharp, explosive sounds which I knew for the rapping of Mancha’s hammer. At the instant of the keeper’s announcement I had seen him rise and gird himself, beginning to look about like a man missing some necessary thing, too perturbed to recall just what he wanted. One of his young men slipped his hammer into his hand, and at the feel of its familiar handle a little of the strained look left his face. Then the crowd swallowed him in its eagerness to hear what Prassade and the keeper said.

Now as the circle broke back from him and the sound of his whirling hammer, I saw the pale blotch of his face and hair distinct in the twilight.

“Oh, Persilope,” he said, “take what measures you will for the recovery of the King’s Desire, but this is my business. Here should be no talk of honor or dishonor, but simple outrage. A man of the Far-Folk has crossed into our country and stolen the Maiden Ward. Let no man put any other name to it until I have brought her back again. But first bring me the smith. Before I go I would ask of him how it is, while the hostage stands, men of his breed have trespassed on my borders. Where is Ravenutzi?”

The crowd turned upon itself. They had a system, though I could never understand it, by which they could locate and account for the tribesmen when called upon. Now on Mancha’s asking, the rustle and movement began, hesitated, and grew rapidly into a deep excited hum of resentment as the word passed from group to group that Ravenutzi was not among them.

X THE LEDGE

Between the morning and the dead hours of night I was awakened in the hut, feeling Evarra’s hands go over me lightly as squirrels’ as she gathered up her belongings.

“What are you doing, Evarra?”

“Making ready.”

“For what?”

“Child, the Ward is stolen and the Far-Folk have taken the King’s Desire, and you ask me that!”

“What is that sound I hear, Evarra, like a wounded creature?”

“It is the mother of the Ward.”

“It hurts to hear it; may I go to her?”

“You! What could you say to her? Besides, it is better for her to have her cry out before she comes where her man is.”

“Where is Prassade?”

“Where we must be at mid-morning, at the Ledge.”

“And Mancha?”

“Where he should have been this month past, at River Ward. It was there the stealers came through.”

“Have you any word?”

“Before the Council parted a message came from the trackers who had found a sign. The stealers went through by Broken Head. Sleep now,” she said.

I heard the light scrape of her feet on the threshold, and I lay still at the bottom of a pit of blackness, from which at unutterable heights I could make out a point of light or two cut off at times by the indistinguishable stir of boughs.

Between the trees the lights of the Outliers illumined the space under the shut branches faintly as the lights in crypts that show where the bones of saints are laid. I lay revolving in my mind all the circumstance of my coming here and of my connection with the Ward and Ravenutzi. Suddenly there flashed forth, like a picture on a screen, the incident of that letter which I had helped Ravenutzi to make. The token he had worn so gaily and lost so unaccountably. It had been a true message dropped conveniently for one who waited for it, and I grew sick and hot in the dark thinking how he had used me. I must have dozed after that, for I thought the sound of crying increased outside, and it was no longer the Ward’s mother, but the tall woman of the woods who called me by my name to upbraid me. A moment later it changed to Evarra calling me awake.

As yet no beam shone or bird sang; I saw the shapes of the women blocked indistinguishably in the mouse-colored mist. I watched them, by that wild faculty of theirs for covering their traces as the fox covers its tracks, draw, as it were, the surface of the forest over all the signs of their occupancy. They strewed dry, rotting fern above the caches, leaf litter where the hearths had been. When I rose and went out to them, Evarra touched my bed with her foot once, twice, and it was no bed, but the summer drift about the roots of trees. As we went hillward silence spread behind us in the meadows and took the place with desolation.

By the ridge between Deep Fern and Deer Lake Hollow the women with young children turned off toward some safe, secret center, there to wait word from their men. Evarra and the more active women kept on to the Ledge. I went with them, not being wanted very much, but because in the hurry of Council no other provision had been made for me.

To understand all that went on in the next few weeks, it is necessary to be precise. Deep Fern is as far from Broken Tree as a strong man can walk in twelve or fourteen hours, walking steadily, and the Ledge is ten hours from Deep Fern. It runs, a great dyke of porphyry, with the contour of the hills, at the upper limit of tall trees and makes a boundary between Outland and the Far-Folk. Beginning and end of it I never saw, but from a place called Windy Cover to River Ward I knew it very well. In this place it passes over shallow, stony soil, in which nothing grows more than knee height, except on the lee side of one strong hill where a triangular space of lilac and toyon reaches quite up to the rocky wall. The chaparral is tall enough for a man or a deer to walk in it upright. Certain small winds forever straying and whirling here, ruffling the tops of the scrub and stirring the branches, make it possible for such a passage to take place unobserved. The stir of a man moving through it, indistinguishable from the running movements of the wind, gives the place its name of Windy Covers.

From here the Ledge goes East, high and impassable, following the hills until it reaches the gap where the river comes through. There it leaves off for a crow’s flight, and the river continues that boundary until it touches the Ledge again. The whole of this space being thickly wooded and the river running shallowly at seasons, it was here the Far-Folk trespassed most. Here past the end of the Dyke the filchers of the King’s Desire had come. The whole region was known as River Ward, and Mancha kept watch over it. Beyond its second point of contact with the dyke, called Broken Head, the Ledge went on south a very great distance. I never heard how far, though from something that I heard at Windy Covers I gathered that the Outliers possessed all the district south as far as the Sur. Just beyond Broken Head the river widens and makes a turn where there is easy passing, called from the sound of it going over the smooth stones, Singing Ford. All the other places I have named lay north of the river between it and the Ledge.

We came to Windy Covers a little after midday. I should have said, looking up its green steep, level grown as a mown field, that all the Outliers were there before us. The tops of the scrub were all ashake; the lilacs tossed, the buckthorn turned and whitened. Lines of wavering showed in it like the stir of a meadow when rabbits run in the grass. But it turned out to be only the wind walking for we were hours ahead of the men.

“Ah, I told you it was good cover,” said Evarra, as we came in by the green tunnels that the deer had made.

I had gathered from the talk of the women that we were to lie there, guarding the pass, and keeping out of River Ward. Mancha was occupying that section now, hoping not to excite the Far-Folk by too active pursuit. It was not known yet if the lifters of the Treasure had passed beyond River Ward or if Ravenutzi had joined them, if indeed he might not yet be on our side the Ledge with the Ward. There were some other points in this connection on which I wished to satisfy myself. So when I saw Lianth mousing along under the wall, I crept after him, unsuspected. We came into a little bay of bitten scrub and a well-trodden track that led up along the stony, broken back of the Ledge. This way the bucks had gone when at the end of the mating season they ranged afar and fed on the high ridges. This way they came down to seek the does, and along this trail I saw Lianth pawing breathlessly, nose to the thick mosses like a snuffling hound.

“They must have come this way,” he said.

“Yes,” I assented, thinking of the deer.

“If they have crossed, there should be some trace of them. They must have come in the night and could not have gone so carefully.” He scrutinized little heaps of leaf litter in the crevices, and squinted along the ground. “And the trackers have not been here either. They cannot have crossed at all.”

All at once I understood that he was talking about Ravenutzi and the Ward.

“There is no other way,” he said, “no other way possible for—a girl.”

“Lianth, where is Herman?”

He left off pawing over the trail and walked on toward the rim of the Ledge.

“Gone after her.”

“Zirrilëe?”

He nodded.

“But why?”

“Mancha sent him.”

“Why should he take so much trouble? She went where she chose. You heard what the keeper said?”

“Ah!” he cried woundedly, “you women are all against her!”

We had reached the top of the Ledge overlooking the Far-Folk country. It was all rounded, grassy hills, stony, full of shallow hollows, with occasional depressed trees, lying in the thin, airy shadows that fall so singularly in high places. It was very still, two or three crows flying over, and far up under the blue a buzzard sailing.

“It’s no use looking out for them,” objected Lianth. “They’ll not show themselves while we are here.”

“Do you think they know?”

“Huh! Do rabbits know when coyotes hunt? If they know about the King’s Desire what wouldn’t they know?”

He was sitting on a heap of stones picking the moss out of the crannies and pitching it down below. His throat and chin were strained and tight as though no songs could come that way again.

“When I think of her hands,” he said, “and the parting of her hair, as white as a dove’s egg ... if she loved anybody she wouldn’t have thought of anything else.”

“Evidently she didn’t,” I insisted cruelly. “But why do you care so much? Even if she hadn’t run away with Ravenutzi it wouldn’t have been you she would have married, it would have been Mancha.”

To look at the boy you would have said his songs were not all dead, one of them rose and struggled to go the accustomed way, and it was a song of boy’s love and wounded trust. He bit it back at last.

“Mancha was the only one good enough for her,” he choked. He was done with the moss now, and was aiming small stones carefully at empty space. “I would have wanted her to have the best.”

“At any rate she took what she wanted.”

He stood up, flushed and tormented.

“You’re just down on her because Herman is in love with her,” he said.

“What makes you think so?”

“I don’t know.” He scuffed the moss with his foot and added, “You can always tell if you’re that way yourself. I don’t want to talk about it any more,” walking away from me.

Presently he came back stiffly.

“You must come with me,” he said; “you can’t stay here. I was told to look after you.”

“What time did Herman go?” I asked as we went down together.