When they left their horses and the camp behind, Brian followed Turlough, feeling like a new man. He had lightened his heart of a great load, and he wished that he had talked of these things with Turlough Wolf long before this. Now he understood why the old man had offered him service as he stood in that attitude on the battlements of O'Reilly's castle after leaving Owen Ruadh, and he understood the love that Turlough bore him, and the silence the old man had kept on the matter, though it must have ever been deep in his heart to speak out. No more words passed between them, nor did Brian tell Turlough more of his story until long after; but of this there was no need. As they climbed higher on the mountain they could see the hundred horsemen filing off to the eastward; but soon these were lost sight of as Turlough led Brian and the fifty through the valleys and deep openings, which were drifted deep in snow, making progress slow and wearisome. Indeed, Brian thought afterward that this hard traveling might have been responsible for what chanced on the other side of 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.