Back of them the redwoods stood up thick as organ pipes, and when the wind stirred, the space above was filled with the click of dropping needles and the flicker of light displaced. I was going on to inquire of Herman how he happened to come stumbling on my trail when I thought him safe at the University, but Noche making a noise of disapproval in his throat, I left off at once, and began to attend to the talk of the children. It grew clear as I fixed upon it or lapsed into unmeaning murmurs as my mind wandered. There were four or five of them busy about those curious structures that children build with pebbles and potsherds and mounds of patted dust, set off by a feather or a flower. Noche, it appeared, was very good at this sort of thing. To their great delight, he was persuaded to undertake a more imposing mound than they could manage for themselves; and presently I had made out idly that the structure in the dust was the pattern of a story he was telling them. It was all of a king’s treasure. Seventy bracelets of gold, he said, all of fine work, chased and hammered, and belts of linked gold, and buckles set with colored stones. He took pebbles from the creek and petals of flowers to show them how that was, and every child was for making one for himself, for Noche to approve. Also he said there were collars of filigree, and necklets set with green stones of the color of the creek where it turned over the falls at Leaping Water. There were cups of gold, and one particular goblet of chased work which an old king held between his knees, around the rim of which a matchless hunter forever pursued exquisite deer. The stem of it was all of honey-colored agate, and in the base there were four great stones for the colors of the four Quarters: blue for the North, green for the South where the wind came from that made the grass to spring, red for the Dawn side of earth, and yellow for the West. And for the same king there was a circlet for his brows, of fire-stones, by which I supposed he meant opals, half a finger long, set in beaten gold. Also there were lamps, jeweled and chased, on golden chains that hung a-light above the kings. When then one of the children, who lay listening with his heels in the air, wished to know if it were true what his father had said, that there was evil in the Treasure which came out upon whoever so much as looked at it, there came a rueful blankness upon the face of old Noche. “Ay,” said he, “and upon whoever so much as talks of it.” And he shook his neglected sling at them as though to have left it off for the sake of a story were a very culpable matter.