They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown redwood litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them. Then one would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless tune, all of dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by the weight of jewels, and another would answer with a song about a lovely maid playing in sea caves full of hollow light. By this we knew the thoughts of all of them ran on the story which held the songs together like a thread. We discovered at last that it was the history of the place from which they had come to Outland, bringing the Treasure with them, pursued by the Far-Folk. Or perhaps it was they who were the pursuers, but the Treasure had been the point of their contention, and it had cost the Outliers so much that they had come to abhor even the possession of it. So having buried it, they made their honor the keeping of the secret. Because the first disturbance over it that reft them from their country had been brought about by the treachery of a woman, they put a woman to the keeping, half in irony, I think, for then they had set a watch upon the woman. It was about this time that Herman waked to an interest on the occasion that nothing else had been able to arouse in him. He thought that a community which had arrived at the pitch of understanding that the best thing to be done with wealth was to get rid of it, would repay study. I remember his wondering if the Outliers had had any more trouble with their Treasure, or what they imagined as such, for he never would credit its reality, than we had experienced with the Coal Oil Trust. I paid very little attention to him, for all my mind was occupied in watching Ravenutzi. From the first I had noticed that whenever there was one of those old tales, or any talk of the King’s Desire, something would spring up in his face, as slight as the flick of an eyelid or the ripple of muscles at the corner of his mouth, but something at which caution snapped wide-awake in me. I recall how once we lay all together at the bottom of the wood in the clear obscure of twilight, in a circular, grassless space where the water went by with a trickling, absent sound. One of the young men began to sing, and Ravenutzi had stopped him with some remark to the effect that the Outliers could sing it so if it pleased them, but the story as it was sung was not true.