ecutioners! No guillotine! So why trouble ourselves? All social and
moral acquisitions, all the subtleties of civilization, all these melt
away in a moment. What remains? The primordial instincts, which are to
abuse your strength, to take what isn't yours and, in a moment of
anger or greed, to kill your fellows. What does it matter? We are back
in the troglodyte age! Let each man look to himself!"

The sound of singing reached them from somewhere ahead, as though the
river had transmitted its loud echo. They listened: it was a French
rustic ditty, sung in a drawling voice to a tuneful air. The sound
drew nearer. From the curtain of mist a large open boat came into
view, laden with men, women and children, with baskets and articles of
furniture, and impelled by the powerful effort of six oars. The men
were emigrant sailors, in quest of new shores on which to rebuild
their homes.

"France?" cried Simon, when they passed.

"Cayeux-sur-Mer," replied one of the singers.

"Then this river is the Somme?"

"It's the Somme."

"But it's flowing north!"

"Yes, but there's a sharp bend a few miles from here."

"You must have passed a party of men carrying off an old man and a
girl bound to two horses."

"Haven't seen anything of that sort," declared the man.

He resumed his singing. Women's voices joined in the chorus; and the
boat moved on.

"Rolleston must have branched off towards France," Simon concluded.

"He can't have done that," objected Dolores, "since his present
objective is the fountain of gold which some one mentioned to him."

"In that case what has become of them?"

The reply to this question was vouchsafed after an hour's difficult
walking over a ground composed of millions upon millions of those
broken sea-shells which the patient centuries use in kneading and
shaping of the tallest cliffs. It all crackled under their feet and
sometimes they sank into it above their ankles. Some tracts, hundreds
of yards wide, were covered with a layer of dead fish on which they
were compelled to trudge and which formed a mass of decomposing flesh
with an intolerable stench to it.

But a slope of hard, firm ground led them to a more rugged promontory
overhanging the river. Here a dozen men, grey before their time,
clothed in rags and repulsively filthy, with evil faces and brutal
gestures, were cutting up the carcass of a horse and grilling the
pieces over a scanty fire fed with sodden planks. They seemed to be a