silence. For awhile
Rodriguez sat and gazed at the might-have-beens in the camp-fire: and
when these began to be hidden by white ash he went to his blankets and
slept. And Morano went quietly about the little camp, doing all that
needed to be done, with never a word. When the horses were seen to and
fed, when the knives were cleaned, when everything was ready for the
start next morning, Morano went to his blankets and slept too. And in
the morning again they wandered on.

That evening they saw the low gold rays of the sun enchanting the tops
of a forest. It almost surprised Rodriguez, travelling without an aim,
to recognise Shadow Valley. They quickened their slow pace and, before
twilight faded, they were under the great oaks; but the last of the
twilight could not pierce the dimness of Shadow Valley, and it seemed
as if night had entered the forest with them.

They chose a camping-ground as well as they could in the darkness and
Morano tied the horses to trees a little way off from the camp. Then he
returned to Rodriguez and tied a blanket to the windward side of two
trees to make a kind of bedroom for his master, for they had all the
blankets they needed. And when this was done he set the emblem and
banner of camps, anywhere all over the world in any time, for he
gathered sticks and branches and lit a camp-fire. The first red flames
went up and waved and proclaimed a camp: the light made a little
circle, shadows ran away to the forest, and the circle of light on the
ground and on the trees that stood round it became for that one night
home.

They heard the horses stamp as they always did in the early part of the
night; and then Morano went to give them their fodder. Rodriguez sat
and gazed into the fire, his mind as full of thoughts as the fire was
full of pictures: one by one the pictures in the fire fell in; and all
his thoughts led nowhere.

He heard Morano running back the thirty or forty yards he had gone from
the camp-fire "Master," Morano said, "the three horses are gone."

"Gone?" said Rodriguez. There was little more to say; it was too dark
to track them and he knew that to find three horses in Shadow Valley
was a task that might take years. And after more thought than might
seem to have been needed he said; "We must go on foot."

"Have we far to go, master?" said Morano, for the first time daring to
question him since they left the cottage in Spain.

"I have nowhere to go," said Rodriguez. His head