to this day, I reckon. But the other boat
was over full, and the steersman was drunken, and she capsized before
she got to the middle of the channel. Some were drowned, and those that
got ashore we hung next morning. But Trail was in the first boat."

"When do you--do we--start down the river?"

"At midnight. And it's the Colonel's orders that until then you stay
here among the rocks and not show yourself to the men below. He'll see
you before we start. In the mean time I'll keep you company." And the
overseer took out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filled the former, lighted
it, and leaning back against the rock fell to smoking in contented
silence.

Landless too sat in silence, with his head thrown back against the rock
and his face uplifted to the growing splendor of the skies. The night
wind, blowing mournfully around the bare hill and the broken crag,
struck upon his brow with a hint of winter in its touch. With it came
the tide of forest sounds--the sough of the leaves, the dull creaking of
branch against branch, the wash of the water in the reeds, the whirr of
wings, the cries of night birds--all the low and stealthy notes of the
earth chant which had become to him as old and tenderly familiar as the
lullabies of his childhood. Below him, at the foot of the hill, a square
of dark and stately pines was irradiated by a great fire which burnt
redly, casting flickering shadows far across the smooth brown earth, and
around which sat or moved many figures. Laughter and jest, oaths and
scraps of song floated up to the lonely watcher upon the hilltop. He
heeded them not--he was above that world--and no sound came from that
other and smaller fire blazing at some distance from the first--and the
tree trunks between were so many and so thick that he could see naught
but the light.

CHAPTER XXXVII

VALE

The overseer knocked the ashes from his pipe and stuck it in his belt.
"The master," he said curtly, getting to his feet as three cloaked
figures, followed by a negro bearing a torch, came up the hillside and
into the waste of stones beneath the crags. Advancing to meet them, he
took the torch from Regulus's hand and fired a mass of dead and leafless
vine depending from the cliff. In the bright light which sprang up,
filling the rocky chamber and burnishing the face of the crags into the
semblance of a cataract of fire, the parties to the interview gazed at
one another in silence.

Colonel Verney was the first