d. "I must go on."

"Yes, you must go on," answered the shoemaker. "But I'll tell you what
I'll do--I'll make them and keep them. Some great day might come when
I shall show them to people and swagger about them." He glanced round
cautiously, and then ended, still bending over his measuring. "They
will be called the shoes of the Bearer of the Sign. And I shall say,
'He was only a lad. This was the size of his foot.'" Then he stood up
with a great smile.

"There'll be climbing enough to be done now," he said, "and I look to
see you again somewhere."

When the boys went away, they talked it over.

"The hair-dresser didn't want to be a hair-dresser, and the shoemaker
didn't want to make shoes," said The Rat. "They both wanted to be
mountain-climbers. There are mountains in Samavia and mountains on the
way to it. You showed them to me on the map.

"Yes; and secret messengers who can climb anywhere, and cross dangerous
places, and reconnoiter from points no one else can reach, can find out
things and give signals other men cannot," said Marco.

"That's what I thought out," The Rat answered. "That was what he meant
when he said, 'There will be climbing enough to be done now.'"

Strange were the places they went to and curiously unlike each other
were the people to whom they carried their message. The most singular
of all was an old woman who lived in so remote a place that the road
which wound round and round the mountain, wound round it for miles and
miles. It was not a bad road and it was an amazing one to travel,
dragged in a small cart by a mule, when one could be dragged, and
clambering slowly with rests between when one could not: the
tree-covered precipices one looked down, the tossing whiteness of
waterfalls, or the green foaming of rushing streams, and the immensity
of farm- and village-scattered plains spreading themselves to the feet
of other mountains shutting them in were breath-taking beauties to look
down on, as the road mounted and wound round and round and higher and
higher.

"How can any one live higher than this?" said The Rat as they sat on
the thick moss by the wayside after the mule and cart had left them.
"Look at the bare crags looming up above there. Let us look at her
again. Her picture looked as if she were a hundred years old."

Marco took out his hidden sketch. It seemed surely one of the
strangest things in the world that a creature as old as this one seemed
could reac