all the hearers; they had seemed to be
away by the bank of the Ebro in the heat and light of Spain, and now
the vast night stripped them and the peaks seemed to close round on
them. They wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down in their
shelters. For a while they heard the wind waving branches and the thump
of a horse's hoof restless at night; then they all slept except one
that guarded the captive, and the captive himself who long lay thinking
and thinking.

Dawn stole through the wood and waked none of the sleepers; the birds
all shouted at them, still they slept on; and then the captive's guard
wakened Morano and he stirred up the sparks of the fire and cooked, and
they breakfasted late. And soon they left the wood and faced the bleak
slope, all of them going on foot and leading their horses.

And the track crawled on till it came to the scorn of the peaks,
winding over a shoulder of the Pyrenees, where the peaks gaze cold and
contemptuous away from the things of man.

In the presence of those that bore them company Rodriguez and Morano
felt none of the deadly majesty of those peaks that regard so awfully
over the solitudes. They passed through them telling cheerfully of wars
the four knights had known: and descended and came by sunset to the
lower edge of the snow. They pushed on a little farther and then
camped; and with branches from the last camp that they had heaped on
their horses they made another great fire and, huddling round it in the
blankets that they had brought, found warmth even there so far from the
hearths of men.

And dawn and the cold woke them all on that treeless slope by barely
warm embers. Morano cooked again and they ate in silence. And then the
four knights rose sadly and one bowed and told Rodriguez how they must
now go back to their own country. And grief seized on Rodriguez at his
words, seeing that he was to lose four old friends at once and perhaps
for ever, for when men have fought under the same banner in war they
become old friends on that morning.

"Senors," said Rodriguez, "we may never meet again!"

And the other looked back to the peaks beyond which the far lands lay,
and made a gesture with his hands.

"Senor, at least," said Rodriguez, "let us camp once more together."

And even Morano babbled a supplication.

"Methinks, senor," he answered, "we are already across the frontier,
and when we men of the sword cross frontiers misunderstandings arise,
so that it is our