s, strange brother, and see if the way be clear,
for Ivan is not minded this time to wait while men go up before."

Negore looked, and he looked with two men by his side, their guns resting
against his breast. He saw that the little birds were all gone, and once
he saw the glint of sunlight on a rifle-barrel. And he thought of Oona,
and of her words: "And when the fighting begins, it is for thee, Negore,
to crawl secretly away so that thou be not slain."

He felt the two guns pressing on his breast. This was not the way she
had planned. There would be no crawling secretly away. He would be the
first to die when the fighting began. But he said, and his voice was
steady, and he still feigned to see with dull eyes and to shiver from his
sickness:

"The way is clear."

And they started up, Ivan and his forty men from the far lands beyond the
Sea of Bering. And there was Karduk, the man from Pastolik, and Negore,
with the two guns always upon him. It was a long climb, and they could
not go fast; but very fast to Negore they seemed to approach the midway
point where top was no less near than bottom.

A gun cracked among the rocks to the right, and Negore heard the war-yell
of all his tribe, and for an instant saw the rocks and bushes bristle
alive with his kinfolk. Then he felt torn asunder by a burst of flame
hot through his being, and as he fell he knew the sharp pangs of life as
it wrenches at the flesh to be free.

But he gripped his life with a miser's clutch and would not let it go. He
still breathed the air, which bit his lungs with a painful sweetness; and
dimly he saw and heard, with passing spells of blindness and deafness,
the flashes of sight and sound again wherein he saw the hunters of Ivan
falling to their deaths, and his own brothers fringing the carnage and
filling the air with the tumult of their cries and weapons, and, far
above, the women and children loosing the great rocks that leaped like
things alive and thundered down.

The sun danced above him in the sky, the huge walls reeled and swung, and
still he heard and saw dimly. And when the great Ivan fell across his
legs, hurled there lifeless and crushed by a down-rushing rock, he
remembered the blind eyes of Old Kinoos and was glad.

Then the sounds died down, and the rocks no longer thundered past, and he
saw his tribespeople creeping close and closer, spearing the wounded as
they came. And near to him he heard the scuffle of a migh