the mountain.

On the higher crests and ridges there was little snow, however, and
Turlough seemed to know every inch of the place by heart, though more
than once Brian gave himself up for lost in the maze of smaller peaks
and the twisted paths they followed. Most of the fifty Turlough had
chosen from those hillmen who had joined Brian by Lough Conn, so that
they were not unused to such climbing, and remained with spirits
unshaken by the vast loneliness that surrounded them, and to which other
men might have succumbed somewhat.

Brian himself was no little awed by the desolate grandeur of the Stone
Mountain, but he only wrapped his cloak more closely about him, and
swore that the Dark Master should yield up the Spanish blade before many
more hours.

And so indeed it was done, though not as Brian looked for.

Until long after noon the band wended their way with great toil and pain
over the flanks of the mountain, until Turlough led Brian out to a point
of black rock and motioned toward the valleys below them.

"There to the left," he said, "is the valley of the Black Tarn. Do you
see that smoke, Brian, and that dark spot between the trees and the
lake?"

Brian looked, squinting because of the snow-glare. Leading down from the
side of the mountain itself was a valley--long, and widening gradually
to the plain, where a dark wood swallowed it up. Almost under his feet,
as it were, was a small, round lake deep in the rock, with a small,
frozen-over outlet that was lost in the snow.

But farther down the valley-slopes there were trees, and among them
horses tethered and a fire strewing smoke on the air close beside.
Between this little wood and the tarn itself there stood a low house of
thatch with smoke also rising from it, and from the other fire among the
trees came a sheen of steel caps and jacks, where were men.

But to Brian all these things were very small and hard to make out
distinctly, as if he were looking at some carven mimicry, such as
children are wont to use in play.

"Now come," said Turlough Wolf. "It is no easy task getting there
without being discovered, and the way is long."

Brian found, indeed, that to avoid being seen from below they must
needs take a roundabout way; but when the afternoon was far spent they
had come to a snow-filled hollow among the rocks which Turlough declared
was just over the edge of that valley-slope where stood the low house.
Turlough said that in his day that house