The car was hopelessly dislocated, that was evident; when Berry started the engine, it clucked like a dying hen for a few revolutions, and failed. He was minded to waste no more time on it. He stowed the contents of the tool-box mysteriously about his person, hid the spare can of petrol in the ditch, and departed to find his bearings, and, if possible, a warm barn to sleep in. Once he looked back at the car. “You look lorst, old girl,” said Berry, “but you aint ’arf so lorst and lonesome as me.”

There are degrees of lostness. Private Berry was lost in the superlative degree—utterly, hopelessly, intensively. It was one o’clock in the morning and cold. The moon was up, so round and white, it reminded him of a peeled onion but persistently in the wrong quarter of the sky. He sighed. He had with him a tin of those striped delicacies known as humbugs, and with these he stayed himself while proceeding to cross the very loneliest landscape he had ever seen in his life.

Nothing moved within the scope of the moon, but Private Berry. He moved stiffly, chinking a little, and leaving behind him an almost visible trail of peppermint. As he walked, he considered and rehearsed what sort of excuses might most reasonably be offered for his late chapter of accidents. “Waited an hour in the market place for Private Corkery, Sir,” he said aloud in a high, hurt voice. “Not my fault I was alone, Sir. . . I dunno, Sir. Maybe ’e got lorst too. . . No, Sir, not when I see ’im. . . Yes, Sir, workshop job. I tried an hour. . . I should say twenty mile, or maybe twenty-two, or a bit to that. . . Yes, Sir, all the way. . Yes, Sir, thank you, Sir.” But the silence spun out his voice so startlingly that he stopped and looked about him. “It’s a cemetery without no monuments,” said Private Berry.

“Talk about a silence that might be felt! You can jolly well ’ear this one.”

It was the quietness that troubled him. Into what country had he wandered, and where were the lines? He had been moving towards a low ridge that ran about a mile from the road where he had left the motor. He topped this rise at last, grunting a little, and very wary. And there beneath him, in the hollow, was the little town.

If Berry had been an imaginative man, he might have thought that the deathly silence possessing the world had its source and origin in this hollow. But he had seen many such villages before—unburied corpses lying where the tides of war had left them; won and lost, lost and won so often that now they had nothing more to win or lose forever, and so were briefly, at peace. He found a downward path contentedly enough. If there was anything left in the place, a roof, an egg, a heap of straw—he relied on himself to find it. But as he descended farther, he began to doubt if he should find even as little as the straw. He had never seen a town so scraped and scoured by destruction. He wondered if he would not have done better to stay by the car.

His boots rang on the first of the paving. A cracked trough with a puddle in it, reflected the moon frostily, and a whirl of dead leaves rustled past him and settled on a door-step that had no house behind it. “Bare as the back of my ’and,” muttered Berry. “I wonder which side ’eld it last. Them, I’ll bet.” And for no reason, a name sprang into his mind—“Von Eichensau.” It was said that no one swept a place so bare as Von Eichensau; other things were said of him too. A fear took hold on Berry that he might be straying into the enemy’s lines; he tried to tiptoe along the cobbles. He tiptoed massively for several minutes down the long wall of a building that might have been a school, but was so torn and shattered by shell that only a paved court and a small cupola over the gate remained to suggest its past. This court was raised from the street; half a dozen steps led to it. And here Berry stopped with a jerk. For an old woman was sitting there.

He couldn’t have told you why she startled him; “Seeing her so sudden,” he would probably have said. But the shock lay in seeing her so orderly, so secure, so very usual; she must have affronted him almost like an indecency in the midst of that ravaged corpse of a town—she, stout, fresh and unfrightened, in a blue cloak and a clean apron, and holding on her knee a big basket covered with a square of shiny waterproof cloth.

For a moment the old woman gazed at Berry; not with fear; but with a certain promise of blank resistance. The moon, however, was kind to Private Berry’s honest “chunky” countenance: accentuated the appeal of a pair of eyes as innocent as a hungry calf’s; glinted on a battered badge. He could feel the precise instant when, without smile or sign, the old woman became friendly. He took heart and a long breath, and achieved his linguistic triumph—“Gee swee perdoo.”

A torrent of rapid nods and words answered him. The old soul clattered to her feet, patted his arm, beckoned him to follow her. She whisked off so quickly that he was left behind, staring in the moonlight; overtaking her in three strides, and relieving her, with a not disinterested gallantry, of the basket, he nearly tossed it over his own head; for he had expected it to be heavy, and he found it light. Peeping under a corner of the cover, he saw that it was full of little paper toys—rosettes, streamers, windmills, red, blue and yellow. He wondered greatly. But his French was not equal to the whole of the situation; he followed in silence through the moon-whitened sepulchre that had been a town.

A single window warmed the black shadows behind the half burnt church with a glow so dim it would have been invisible in the moonlight. Here they stopped and crept through a door veiled in ruin and drunkenly ajar. The room they first entered was so wrecked that they crawled over piles of dust and rubbish, under sooty beams that let the blank white night through. Berry, very much on the alert, saw nothing unharmed, nothing that had kept its shape and use, but a single shelf upon which set a row of tiny wooden dolls. Then they went under a curtain of dirty canvas, into warmth and firelight and a singular peace.

The room beyond the curtain was undamaged, except that the plaster had fallen from the brick in many places; and it was neat and clean. A cheap lamp with a bright tin reflector was on the wall, there was a table covered with a blue checked cloth, a dresser with some old blue earthenware, a chair or two, an old painted bench, fire in a brazier. Two men were sitting on the bench as Berry entered, and they flashed to their feet with a swiftness of movement that was uncanny; for both were old. The woman began to explain in a shower of nods, patting Berry’s arm. He caught “Anglais, Anglais,” and patted his own chest, saying vigorously “That’s me. . .” At the sound of his voice, they relaxed; one, who was a priest, dropped back upon the bench; the other came forward, bowing and rubbing his hands; he shook Berry’s hand timidly. He was a small man who carried his head bent, and continually looked up under gray apologetic eyebrows. Berry liked him somehow; he returned the handshake heartily, and even attained to a “Bongser, Mosoo le cury,” for the priest. The old woman passed into a room beyond, smiling and nodding back at Berry. And after a pause the priest answered in a voice rough and rich with the country’s accent, “I speak some English, my friend.”

“And very well too, Sir,” returned Berry, politely at his ease and unburdening himself of the heavier portions of the tool kit. “I can get along well enough in the Francy, but it takes time. . . and maybe you could tell me where I am, Sir, for it’s a matter of three hours since I knew!”

“This was St. Aubyn.” The priest spoke with long pauses and hesitations, as if not sure of what he would say. The little man, who had been standing aside with his meek look of inquiry bent on Berry, now said something friendly, helped him off with his coat, patted him into a chair near the brazier, and called gently, “Judic, Judic!” The old woman came back with something thin but hot in a bowl and a plate of bread. Berry shook his head at her, he had some rations left, he didn’t want to deprive them. . . But the curé said in his heavy voice, “You need not hesitate. There is plenty.” So he ate and drank, watched by three pairs of eyes that were singularly incurious; it was not so much that they were uninterested in him as that they were absorbed in something else. And Berry, trained by war to be never entirely trustful, wondered what it was. He resolved to know.

St. Aubyn. . . “You may well say. This was St. Aubyn.” He addressed the company in general, and beamed on Mère Judic as she took away the empty bowl. “I’ve seen some places. . . None so bad as this, though. None so downright thorough. Which makes it all the queerer, if you’ll excuse me, to find this”—he circled a thumb slowly about the dim, quiet room—“to find anything so ’omelike as this at two-o’clock in the morning.” To himself he added, “You’ve a fine old face, Mossoo le cury, but it’s a listenin’ face. I wonder what you three are waitin’ here for?”

“You know where you are?” asked the priest, calmly. “You have perhaps heard of this—this town before?”

“I ’ave.” Berry was blunt. “Most of us ’ave. But I’d never ’ave thought to find a livin’ soul inside of it, though.”

“Ah!” The word was a slow sigh. “And yet there are three—living souls. Three.”

“What makes you stay?” asked Berry suddenly, and he had not meant to say it. “If it’d been me—if this’d been my town—”

“Yes?” The old man on the bench smiled faintly.

Berry leaned forward. “Well, look ’ere,” he went on rapidly, almost in a whisper, “wasn’t this where Von Eichensau turned the guns on a school—because ’e said a shot had come from a winder?”

Again, faintly, the priest smiled. “Yes, my friend,” he answered, with the air of politely answering irrelevant questions, “Yes, it was here. And that was the school, where our old Judic saw you first. You can see the marks on the walls. There was—how do you say it?—no place of refuge for the children—the little small children. . . Two of our good Rogiet’s were there.”

“Oui, oui.” The small meek Rogiet seemed to catch the sense, and nodded and smiled nervously, like a shy child to whom attention has suddenly been drawn. “Oui, oui. Deux de mes petites filles.”

“Well, then—” Berry stammered, and fell suddenly silent. The two Frenchmen had exchanged a brief glance, as two intimates exchange glances in a crowd of strangers; and it was like the revelation of a hidden country by flashlight, a momentary rending of a veil in the temple of human pain. He felt himself a stranger, an alien to the passions, the thoughts, the memories that gave to the stuffy cheerful room the atmosphere of a spiritual battlefield. Here in truth was a language he did not know. He turned with relief to old Judic, who had appeared, with a candle-end, at his elbow.

“You will rest an hour or two—yes?” asked the priest. But it was not a question, it was a dismissal. Without a word Berry followed her up a little laddery staircase into a sort of loft. When she wished him good-night, he answered absently in English. He wished to be alone, to think whether it had been fancy or reality that before Judic had taken him to the stairs, she had turned to the door of the other room; and that a voice had whispered with a fierce emphasis, “Non, non, pas là. . .”

Well, as soon as the door of the loft closed behind her, Berry had his wish; he found himself quite shudderingly alone, resting his arms on the sill of the one small window, and covering his hands over his ears. He swore at himself in pure astonishment, for the action had been involuntary. “You’re looney,” he told himself, “going looney like the lot downstairs. Sittin’ up all dressed at two in the mornin’ and listenin’!. . . Wot do they think they’re listenin’ for? You’ve no call to listen, any’ow.” He pocketed his hands resolutely and turned away from the window; but deep down in his soul something was crouching and crying that it didn’t want to know, it didn’t want to hear. . . Private Barry flung himself down on the straw mattress that lay under the window, rolled himself up in a couple of things that looked like tablecloths, pulled his coat over him, and determined to go to sleep.

Once he woke himself, saying, “But wot do they want to stay ’ere for?” Again, he found himself awake and standing at the window, which he thrust open. It was very stiff and the hinges creaked; outside, the world lay still, shorn, desolate in the moonlight; a dead world lighting the dead. The priest was standing under the window, looking up at it; when he saw Berry, he lifted his arm in silence and made the sign of benediction. Berry closed the window. He had a file in his pocket; this he wedged under the door, so that it could not be opened from the outside. There was something else in another pocket, a small neat weapon, of a kind not supplied by government to the private soldier. This he placed ready to his hand, and lay down again. He intended to stay awake, but sleep took him irresistibly.

The third time he woke as if forcibly wrenched out of that sleep. The voice inside him seemed to be shouting “This is it! Now you’ll know, now you’ll hear!” And he heard—what? A voice in the room below, or the ghost of one, singing an old French version of “One, two, buckle my shoe.” But the voice was not French. And presently the song broke off and ended in a hurry of shouted orders that sent Berry to his feet and to the door in a single cat-like bound. For voice and words were German.

“Trapped, by Gord!” panted Berry. He crouched at the crack of the door, the revolver fidgeting in his hand. He was remotely sorry for himself; it seemed so stupidly unfair to have come through two years of war unhurt, only to be ‘done in’ at last by three traitorous old peasants in a deserted town. But he’d do the French a good turn and take half-a-dozen along with him. . . He waited. He was not a man; he was himself a weapon tense with death. And through the long-drawn minutes, nothing happened. All was still.

At last he could bear it no longer. His boots he had taken off. Silently he worked out the wedge and opened the door. He stole down the stairs and into the room below. It was dark now, but there was a white patch of moonlight on the far wall, like a square of paper stuck there. Across it was creeping the black figure of a man. In an instant, Berry had him pinned.

There was a certain satisfaction in gripping and holding and feeling the frightened heart pound under his arm. . . He wondered if the revolver would go off if he used the butt; and why the man made so little effort against him. . . He turned the face up in the square of light, and it was the meek Rogiet, apparently half-dead with fright. Berry gave an ugly little laugh under his breath. He was suddenly and savagely angry. “Where are the others, you Judas?” he whispered, forgetting the little man could not understand. He slid the revolver forward until it rested almost against Rogiet’s grizzled cheek.

Over his own shoulder an arm passed, and the revolver was strongly grasped and held. He wrenched it free and sprang back by one instinctive movement, covering both Rogiet and the priest, who stood quite still before him. Only Rogiet made a little scared movement to get in front of the curé. “Well?” gasped Berry hoarsely. “Well?” The priest raised his hand.

“My son,” he said gently, “you are mistaken. Go again and sleep.”

Berry began to laugh, silently, rocking a little on his feet. “I ’eard, I tell you, you dam liar,” he whispered, “I ’eard ’im,—singin’ and shoutin’ orders to his men. Tell ’em to come and take me! Tell ’em. . .” He wheeled to the door of the other room, for suddenly within it the voice rose again, shouting commands. With a sob, Berry backed away, but only as far as the wall, waiting for death when the door should open.

It opened. And there came out Mère Judic.

It was too late to stop the shot; not too late to jerk up the barrel in the very act. The bullet ripped into the ceiling, and old Judic’s face stared at him horrified in a cloud of dust. The place was full of dust, and furious talking and confusion; out of which the priest came, and stood in front of Berry, and laid a kind hand on his shoulder.

“You are mistaken. But you have not the blame. That is ours. We should have told you. . . But we thought he would be quiet.”

Berry simply waited.

“That is our prisoner you hear in there.”

“Your prisoner. . . ?”

“Yes. Do you understand? It is how you say it?—our prisoner. When they left the town—the last time—one, he remained.”

“Why?”

“He would not go,” said the priest gravely.

After some time, Berry passed his hand over his eyes. “O yes!” he agreed wearily, “I understand—just about as much as I understand what’d keep an ’Un ’ere on his own, and what’d keep you three, who are none of you as young as you was, ’ere to look after ’im; and what brought me into it at all. . . And you take it in turns to guard ’im, you and Mister Rogiet and the little old lady?”

He rubbed his eyes again with his knuckles.

“We do not guard him.”

“Not guard ’im . . . ?”

It seemed to Berry there was a certain chill, a certain stillness abroad. That the priest’s voice came from a distance when he said “There is no need. All the treasures of the whole earth, they would not call him from that poor room. . .” And he led Berry to the door, and opened it.

It was a very small room, with a slanted roof and a truckle-bed, and it was full of shadow. From the shadow sprang one clear and unforgettable face, with loosened mouth and eyes fastened on the doorway at about the level of Berry’s belt. And Berry knew that face; knew the arched nose, the singular long jaw, the hair black and close as sealskin; knew them, as did thousands of other men, from whispered stories in billets, from half-uttered tales under the stars, when voices broke into curses forgiven of God. . .

“My son, I said to you—is it not?—that there were but three living souls in St. Aubyn. And it is true. This is a dead one. Soon it’s body will die also, and then we shall go.”

When had the door been shut and that face hidden? Berry did not know. He was sitting at the table with his elbows on the blue checked cloth and his hands over his eyes.

“Why does ’e stay? . . .”

A silence. Then—“He will not pass the children in the doorway. He sees them there always, all about him—the little young children—so very small and young. When they went, and we came back, to see if there were any of the others, we found him in hiding in the crypt, you understand. He could not get away from those little children—our little children. . .”

“ ’E’s mad, of course.”

“Of course. Perhaps we are all a little mad.”

“And you stayed—Gord, you stayed!—with that mad devil!”

The priest cried in a terrible voice. “Do you think it was not good for us to stay? We of St. Aubyn—we three who are here and live—do you not think that we have need to believe in God? Do you not think we have need to keep under our eyes the beginning—the so very little beginning—of the judgment of God? Without the faith in that justice, we could not live, we could not save our souls. We were lost. . . lost. . . But ‘panem de coelo praestitisti eis, alleluia. Et tecum principium in die virtutis tuae, in splendoribus sanctorum. . .’ ”

“And—and the ole lady—the little toys in the basket?”

The priest’s voice changed. Berry knew that he was weeping. “Eh, what shall I say? I am an old man. I have no children of my flesh. . . He is mad, and Judic is very mad too, and very old. . . She says they are there, the children. She says that she sees their faces between the light and the dark. Small happy faces under a whiteness like the veils of the First Communion. Eh, we are very old and we have seen too much. . . So she makes the little toys still, singing as she twists the paper. And she takes her basket to the steps of the school, and sits there as she did use to—and—sells them. What do I say? I know not what she does, or what is given her. . . Only that she returns, and sometimes her basket is. . . empty. . .”

“And the madman in there?”

“Is Kurt Von Eichensau. Yes.” Presently he added, “If you do not object, I will open the door. If the door is shut, it causes him to make an outcry. We do not want a noise. You need not fear, he will not come out. He will not cross that threshold where stand the little children he killed.”

When dawn, colourless and cold as the moonlight it replaced, drew a faint line along the rim of the ruined land, Berry slowly climbed the path that led him back to his world. Once he stopped and raised a hand to the curé, standing—though Berry could not see him—in the soot-black shadow of the church; where the one window still glowed dimly, like a watching eye whose light was soon to be quenched. Again he stopped, and looked at something that lay in his hand; it was a little paper windmill which Judic had given him out of her basket for a keepsake. But he stopped a third time by a little bush which grew on the slope, where a few green spires promised crocuses. He stuck the windmill-stick in the earth; the gaudy little toy began to twirl merrily in the wind.

“I won’t take it away,” said Berry jerkily to himself, “the kids—might miss it.”

The ridge rose behind him and hid St. Aubyn. Striding very quickly, he went on to meet the dawn.

“There’s another!” Charron rested his pick amongst the shale, and glanced across at the flanks of Mount Morin, where a new snow-field had broken loose from its moorings, and plunged into the tremendous valley in a spout of diamond dust, with a roar that jarred the rocks. There had been early snow in the hills, followed by warm weather; and the lordly heights of the Nicolum were stripping themselves of their frozen cloaks. Charron looked uneasily at the ranges, then glanced at his chum. “Jack,” he went on, with some hesitation, “I guess the time’s come to decide if both of us, or only one, can go out this year.”

Men don’t speak of leaving the Nicolum before the winter, or of going down from it, or away from it. They say “going out,” and it’s an expressive phrase.

Jack Rainger straightened slowly; a tall fellow, grave, and a little stiff in the back; stiff, you would have said, in the will, too. He smiled across at Charron’s fair-haired, sanguine youth, saying: “Then we’ll have to decide which one’s to go, for there isn’t enough dust to take us both out on a holiday, and bring us both back again in the spring!”

“Sure only one can go, Jack?”

Rainger drew from his belt a little sealskin bag, and tossed it to the other. “Weigh that!” he said. “That’s all we’ve saved. And there’s just about enough dollars in it to pay one fellow’s expenses out and back. The other’ll have to stay behind and work. The question is, which of us two needs to go out the most?”

Charron lowered his eyes, as if a little afraid of what his chum might read in them. Tapping with his pick among the loose stones, he muttered: “And whichever goes, it’ll be deadly hard on the one that stays behind.”

“Yes,” agreed Rainger, quietly. “Deadly hard.”

Charron glanced up, swiftly. “If—if it wasn’t for Maisie,” he said, awkwardly, “you should have every ounce of it, Jack, old man, and welcome. But—I have to think of her too. I—I want to see her . . . .” His voice broke; he turned away, staring at the hills which stand round about the Nicolum as they stood at the world’s birth. “Sometimes,” he went on, hurriedly, “I’ve felt as if I couldn’t stand it another minute, that I’d have to throw over everything—throw you over!—and go out for good, without making my pile or anything, tear these cursed rocks down, kick ’em to powder, just to get a sight of her! I—I made a face in the snow last night, like I used to make of clay in the barn-loft a thousand years ago. Her face. I kissed it when I’d made it. It was like kissing the dead . . . .”

The broken young voice trailed to silence. Rainger stepped across the flume, and lightly touched the shaken shoulder. “I know, Will,” he said, softly. “I know. It’s that way I feel about Laure.”

Charron, without turning, reached for his hand. “I know,” he said, again. “You’re—you’re the best of good chums, Jack. The best. I don’t forget about you and Laure. I don’t forget that it’s two years since you’ve seen her, too. But—you know Maisie!” He turned a flushed, stormy face. “You knew her. You were such friends. You must be able to guess what she’d be to a fellow who was more than a friend. That night I was at her house, saying good-bye, and you had to come to fetch me, for fear I’d miss the train. . . .”

He was silent again, and again Rainger touched his shoulder softly, saying: “You should have the dust without a thought, Will, if—if it wasn’t for Laure.”

“That’s it. It’s because of them. We’ll have to decide as justly as we can, keep the chances level, for their sakes. But I don’t know how.”

He turned, with an attempt at a laugh. Rainger did not echo it. He, in his turn, was staring at the granite barrier, beautiful and terrible, builded between them and their desires. He said: “It’d be only fair, only right, that the one to go out should be the one who needs to go most. But I don’t know which that is.” He moved with a sharp sigh, stooped, and picked from the ground two chips of quartz, shiny as stars. He balanced them in either hand. “Laure—Maisie. Maisie—Laure!” he said, grimly. “Which is it to be? For I take it we’re thinking more of them than of ourselves. Which needs the most to see her promised man?” He dropped the chips abruptly, and turned away. “Come, Will,” he finished, “we may as well quit work for to-day. It’s near sunset, and it’ll be a rough road home, without the darkness added to it.”

He took up his prospecting tools and walked a few yards along the ledge. Charron did not at first follow him, Rainger waited, and at last the other joined him. The younger man, still in a flushed dream, was gazing at something that lay in the palm of his hand. This, with a boyish impulse, he held out to Rainger.

“Look, Jack,” he said, softly. Rainger looked. It was a silver hairpin—a little prong of metal headed with a silver ball, carved like a fourfold flower.

“Maisie’s,” went on Charron, almost in a whisper. “D’you remember that last night when you’d been out to Weston to say good-bye to Laure, and you came on with the outfit in a cab to pick me up at the house in Cedar Street, where I’d been saying good-bye to my Maisie? I remember. You came in, and you found us all in the sitting-room, and Maisie’s mother was teasing her because I’d knocked her hair down. Such pretty hair! It came down because she’d given me this out of it. She had two in, and she gave me one,—warm from her hair, Jack. Later on the rest of it came down; she’d lost the other pin. I begged her to let it stay down, d’you remember? She made a face at me, and she said: ‘I can’t stick it up now the other hairpin’s lost. P’raps I’ve given that to someone else, you old silly!’ And—and then the evening was gone, and there was nothing left of it all but this silver hairpin.” He slipped it back into his inner pocket. “Well, I’m a selfish fool, Jack, but I can’t stop thinking of her. Come on, and we’ll have flapjacks with rum in ’em, and perhaps the gods’ll decide for us.”

They turned in silence down the windy ledges towards the little log-built shanty, that for two years they had called home. And as they went, each saw a face drawn upon the lovely dusk. To those faces their hearts turned with the devouring longing born of uttermost solitude; no man knowing them, could have said which heart yearned the more strongly to its goal. Charron walked with a frowning face, his big fingers clenched upon the little silver pin. Rainger had his face raised; his eyes sought the first star, and rested there.

No human eyes saw them, none awaited them, none expected them; but on the high ridges ahead a watcher rose suddenly to his delicate hooves, shook his great curved horns to the wind, and fled away like a shadow. They had been seen of the mountain sheep; and as the leader wheeled, he loosened a broad stone, which slid, and rested, and slid a little farther. There it gathered to itself a shower of pebbles, bright as roving stars, quartz pebbles, and damp snow; and shifted again, and hung quivering.

Rainger was ten yards ahead when the roar came from the heights immediately above them. And Charron cried out and leapt forward; but if he had gone on wings he would have been too late. The mountain spouted death at them. He saw the snow-slide pouring fluid as foam, eddying like cloud, yet whirling the lesser boulders with it, and tearing the young spruce trees from their hold. Then the fringe of wind and stones and whirling snow-clots caught him and struck him aside, as if he had been a straw; he was bruised, blinded, beaten to his knees, to his face. He rolled instinctively to the inner side of the ledge, and lay huddled there, without feeling, without thought, almost without sense. Only when silence, save for a dying thunder of reverberant echoes, brought strength again to bruised mind and body, he struggled to his feet, his clothes in rags, as if he had been fighting a pack of dogs, and staggered forward, crying to Rainger.

He had no thought that he would find his friend. For the mountain-side was swept as if a vast broom had passed down it. He crawled to the lip of the ledge where it over-hung the sheer abyss. He was sobbing as he looked over; for the hardships and sacrifice of those two iron years had bound him to Rainger, and Rainger to him, in a more than brotherly love. And there, not twenty feet beneath him, he saw Rainger’s body resting against a shattered balsam, draggled as if a tide had swept it, and motionless.

“Jack! Jack! can you hear? I’m coming to you, chum!”

He thought the figure stirred faintly. He was not sure. He looked round desperately for help.

But,—shaken, battered as he was,—all help must come from him. He summoned his reeling will to govern that rebellious brute, the reeling body. He had a thin rope coiled round his waist, which they had used in some of their perilous short-cuts from the claim to the cabin below; he unwound it, the mountains spinning about him in wheels of blue and white and violet as he did so. He was almost afraid to draw breath lest he should start another slide, and the helpless man beneath him be dashed away; but in that event, they would both go . . . . He found a stump which would bear the rope. He was panting all the time: “Jack! Hold on, Jack. I’m coming to you.” There was no response. He wondered, as he lowered himself, scrambling down the steep beneath the ledge, if he would find his friend dead. He couldn’t realize life, somehow, with old Jack out of it . . . .

He brought up with his feet on the balsam roots; they were slippery, for the snow had peeled them of bark as you peel an orange. He turned with caution and stooped to his friend. He was trembling, the strong young man, like a girl. He scarcely dared touch that motionless head, raise the pale face streaked with scarlet, bind the rope about the body. It was long, and new, and unfrayed, and he thanked God for it. When he had adjusted it, and rested Jack once more against the roots, there was plenty of slack. He climbed again to the ledge and rested there a moment. Then, by sheer muscle, hauled the other up, drew him over, laid him on the planed and polished rocks, and went down beside him.

He could do no more for awhile. His strength was as water. He could not even stretch out a hand to find if Rainger still lived.

By and by he drew himself to his knees. He turned to Jack, and lifted his head to an easier position. How pale he was, dear old fellow . . . . He slipped a shaking hand under the torn shirt to feel if the heart beat at all; and sky and hills grew to an awful stillness in their places, as his fingers closed on and drew out a little canvas bag.

It had hung about Rainger’s neck. That same awful stillness of the heights was on Charron as he felt within it a little metal prong headed by a carved ball.

A silver hairpin . . . .

“I can’t stick it up now the other hairpin’s lost. P’raps I’ve given that to someone else, you old silly!”

The remembered words beat upon him in hammer-blows, for all their music of laughter and speech. He looked about him half-stupidly, thinking to see beside him the elfish, teasing face in the cloud of loosened hair. He saw only the ice-veins in the rock, a single fan of golden lichen the avalanche had spared, and then that other face—Jack’s face—frowning now, flushed a little with returning life, trembling back to consciousness.

And all those long months Jack had worn against his heart that other silver hairpin from Maisie’s fair head. Traitor, that he was, to Charron—to Laure. Or was there another traitor! Had he taken it, or had Maisie given it to him?

Charron shrank and twisted as he had writhed away from the snow-slide. But no space could separate him from that doubt. It leapt full-armed to life. It came irresistibly as a tide, drowning every foothold of faith in a moment, washing away every barrier, laying waste the soul. He turned heavily in that aching stillness. He wanted to tear the bag from its cord, grind it into a little scrap of rubbish, and throw it into the deep—that was his first thought. He had let it fall again on Rainger’s breast; he laid a twitching, ice-cold hand on it; and Rainger lifted his own hand and laid it over Charron’s.

“Will!” he said, faintly. Then, in a stronger voice: “Did the slide catch me? I don’t remember. My head’s very bad. Did I go over with it?”

“Yes.”

“And you hauled me out again?”

“Yes.”

Rainger smiled. “Good old boy!” he whispered. “You’d never go back on a chum, would you, Will? I’ll be all right in a little while. I guess I was stunned. Might have been dead but for you, eh?”

“I—wish you had been . . . .”

“Will!”

“I—wish I’d left you to lie there,—you vile thief!”

An appalled wonder settled on Rainger’s face. He raised himself to his elbow, still staring at Charron; got to his knees, then to his feet. They faced each other, those two ragged, battered men, at a yard’s distance. For long minutes neither moved, neither spoke. Then Charron stretched out a shaking hand to the little bag Rainger had covered with his own.

“Tell me where you got it!” he said, thickly.

“What? What? Are you mad, Will?”

“The hairpin. Maisie’s silver hairpin. The other one,—in the bag round your neck!”

“You are mad! There’s no hairpin there!”

“Show me! Show me!”

Rainger’s face hardened. He answered, harshly enough: “No! You can take my word for it!”

“You—vile—liar!” said Charron, heavily, and came nearer.

“Will, old fellow, you’re sick, you’re not yourself . . . .”

“I’m not myself. I shall never be myself again. You and Maisie have . . . . killed me.”

“Will, for God’s sake, listen!”

“To more lies? I felt it there under the canvas; felt the prongs and the ball on the top carved with little silver roses. Maisie’s other pin. She said: ‘P’raps I’ve given that to someone else, you old silly . . . .’ Had she, Jack, had she? Or did you pick it up? I could forgive you then, for you couldn’t help loving her, could you, though I’d be sorry for Laure? Tell me if you found it or if she gave it to you. Tell me . . . . Only tell me the truth, no more lies! All these two years and nothing but lies. Jack!”

Through white lips, Rainger said: “I shall neither speak to you, nor lie to you, as you say, again.” And there was something implacable in his quietness; he was quick to pity where he loved; but doubt was to him the unpardonable sin against any love. And Will—Will!—had refused to believe him.

“You shall tell me if you found it or if she gave it to you!”

Rainger was silent. He had his own dumb devil of pride, which would have kept him silent then, though the world fell.

“Jack! If I kneel to you . . . . ?”

Silent still, and almost with wonder, Rainger stared at the man who doubted. And there rose up against Charron all the bitter longing and desolation of those exiled years. Something seemed poised above him, rushing down on him; an avalanche of darkness such as no hill ever loosed on man. He staggered forward, crying terribly: “You shall tell, if I have to tear the truth out of you with my hands!” He flung himself, panting, on Rainger, bore him backwards. They fell together and rolled to the lip of the ledge. Charron was uppermost. A swift and dreadful energy was his, a sureness of strength. He thrust Rainger outward till his unsupported head was over the sheer fall, the swept rock, and the spruce far below. “Tell now!” he said.

Rainger’s head went back, his eyelids fluttered, he was near fainting again. The edge of rock burnt the back of his neck like hot metal. His anger fell away. He felt that he must keep very quiet, or Will would have something to be sorry for . . . . The thought came mechanically; he could not have spoken to save either Will or himself.

“Did you find it? Did she give it to you?”

Rainger’s senses wavered. He heard the words from a distance. Yet those were Will’s hands brutally grasping him, that was Will’s savage, panting breath. The edge of pain passed to his shoulders and scorched there. His neck was an agony. He was beyond speech then, even if his hurt faith would have let him speak. The sky rode upon his eyes, beneath him the earth swam in vast abysses of silver and amethyst. The universe swung and poised, ready to crush him; then, steadied to a calm star. He knew he could not lose the star. Nearly gone, his eyes rested on it. He just breathed the word: “Laure . . . .”

He was aware of a cry going past him. He felt himself drawn suddenly to safety and laid down. He felt no more. Once again the world went out in a sweep of many waters; but even there he knew his star was with him, and would be with him to the end.

He woke, from swoon or sleep, to a world grown darker. The air was cold, and solemn with an utter quietness. The hills were silvering in moonlight before the day had entirely faded from them. Many stars were there, a great company of witnesses. He sat up; and saw at his feet the black shape of a man crouched upon the rock.

“Will . . . .”

Charron lifted his head slowly from his knees. His face was changed as if years had passed over him. He said slowly: “Do you remember? You’re speaking to a man who would have killed you an hour back.”

“I remember. Is it so long?”

“Yes.” The dead voice altered; he went on, hurriedly. “I have sat here with you. I have not touched you. I am not—fit to touch you. I’ve waited; not knowing if you’d live or die . . . . You can never forgive me, of course. It’s past that. But if you could give me the charity you’d show to any cur, the kindness you have for a lost husky or a hungry Siwash . . . . and then let me go . . . .”

The broken, humble voice died away. After a long silence, Rainger said: “Then you did not look?”

“No.”

“Come and look now, then. I was wrong too, Will. I should have spoken.”

Charron crept to his side. Rainger lifted the little canvas bag and shook something from it into his hand. This he held out to Charron.

“This is what was in it, Will.” Charron’s very life was in abeyance as he looked and looked again.

“Two long needles,” went on Rainger’s quiet voice, “their points stuck in a shrivelled chestnut that Laure picked up in the woods one day. They’re the only needles I’ve got whose points will go through leather. I keep ’em that way round my neck so they won’t get rusty. That’s your silver hairpin, Will.”

After a long time Charron moved. He sank slowly to his face, and lay there with his hands clasped over his head. Presently, he began to cry as a tired child cries, with sobs and broken words. Rainger waited, silently. When that passion had also spent itself, he too, moved. He took from his belt the pouch containing the hoarded gold-dust, and laid it by Charron’s hand. “This is yours, Will,” he said, gently.

Charron looked up. His eyes rested on the compassion of his friend’s face, as Rainger’s eyes had rested on his star.

“I guess this has decided for us, Will. You’re the one who will take the dust and go out and see your girl this winter; for you’re the one who needs to go the most.”

Charron looked at him, still with breathless, humble questioning.

“It’s this way, Will. Laure and I, we’re secure of each other. We can wait. Two years—five years—twenty; if it’s God’s will we can afford to wait a lifetime, and know it will make no difference. She trusts me as I trust her. Love like that—casts out fear.” He finished, almost with tenderness. “If I’d seen you with anything of hers—the most intimate, the most dear things,—in your hands, on your heart, I’d have known there was some explanation. Even then I couldn’t have doubted her . . . . or you.

“But it’s not that way with you. Your love isn’t self-sustaining. It needs to see, to touch, to know; or else it doubts and suffers. Take the dust and go and see Maisie. But—don’t teach her to doubt, poor child.”

“Jack . . . .”

“Ours is the stronger, you see, Will. And the strong things of life can always afford to wait. It’s you who must go and I who must stay, because your need’s the greater of the two.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet, and waited a moment. But there was no word from Charron, flung before him in the dust of the soul. Rainger turned away and took a few steps down the giddy ledge, holding to the rocks as he went. But in a little while he paused, and turned again, and called, wistfully: “Will!”

Some sort of a broken answer. Rainger, his eyes on his serene star, smiled a little.

“I’m kind of—knocked about, Will. Won’t you come and help me home?”

He stood patiently in the clear, kind twilight, till, with a great sobbing cry, Charron rose and ran to him, and put a strong arm around him, holding him as though he would never let him go. And so, under the eternal patience of the stars, they went slowly down together to their home.