gentle, patient comrade was gone from me, that somewhere within those
black and awful depths her tender body was lying. She was dead, her
sweet voice for ever hushed, she that had been so vitally alive! And
remembering all her pretty ways I grew suddenly all blind with tears
and, casting myself down, lay a great while sobbing and groaning until
I could weep no more.

At last, sitting up, I wondered to find my head so painful, and putting
up my hand found my face all wet and sticky with blood that flowed from
a gash in my hair. And remembering how I had fallen and the reason of
my haste I started up and forthwith began seeking my knife and hatchet,
and presently found them hard by where I had tripped. Now standing
thus, knife in one hand and hatchet in the other, I turned to look down
upon these dark and evil waters.

"Goodbye, my lady!" says I, "Fare thee well, sweet comrade! Before
to-morrow dawn we will meet again, I pray, and shalt know me for truer
man and better than I seemed!" So, turning my back on the lake I went
to seek my vengeance on her destroyers and death at their hands an it
might be so.

In a while I came to that torrent where the water flowed out from the
lake, its bed strewn with tumbled rocks and easy enough to cross, the
water being less in volume by reason of the dry weather. All at once I
stopped, for amid these rocks and boulders I saw caught all manner of
drift, as sticks and bushes, branches and the like, washed down by the
current and which, all tangled and twisted together, choked this narrow
defile, forming a kind of barrier against the current. Now as I gazed
at this, my eyes (as if directed by the finger of God) beheld something
caught in this barrier, something small and piteous to see but which
set me all a-trembling and sent me clambering down these rocks; and
reaching out shaking hand I took up that same three-pronged pin I had
carved and wrought for her hair. Thus stood I to view this through my
blinding tears and to kiss and kiss it many times over because it had
known her better than I. But all at once I thrust this precious relic
into my bosom and stared about me with new and awful expectation, for
the current which had brought this thing would bring more. So I began
to seek among these rocks where the stream ran fast and in each pool
and shallow, and once, sweating and shivering, stooped to peer at
something that gleamed white from a watery hollow, and gasped my relief