I have no notion how long we lay in the neighborhood of River Ward. By this time we had lost all track of the calendar, Herman and I, and the Outliers had none except the orderly procession of the season’s bloom and fruit and mating time. Great umbrageous clouds came up behind the hills and were cut down by the wind. Clear days succeeded one another, matched so perfectly for warmth and color that the consciousness took no account of the dividing nights. Crowns of foothills lying seaward showed increasing green and then faint flecks of poppy color. These were our quietest days, for though there was fighting and following, Herman and I had no active part in it. Consider how few we were in a great land, and no trumpeting, no shock of guns, no daily bulletin. Ten men would set out on the mere stirring of an animal sense that beyond a certain hill or in a known hollow lurked the breeders of offense. And then no news of them except as they came or did not come again. Companies of Far-Folk and Outliers would fence all day each to come at the other unsuspected: flights and evasions and sharp encounters took place in such deeps of leafage as dulled all sound. All this was covered, swept over as carefully as the wild creature hides its ways. Often now, walking on the tawny-colored hill that sleeps above the bay with the Mission between its paws, I look back at the warm-tinted slopes, beyond the reach of the encroaching fogs, and wonder under what peaks, between what long blue ranges we lay that season. What tumult and warfare goes on in those still spaces unregarded? But we have never, as I said in the beginning, got any nearer to it than Broken Tree. The Outliers stuck to the track of the Far-Folk, and had so much the better of them in readiness and organization that before long they had captured the most of their women. Under Mancha our men had sought out their homes, abandoned so hurriedly, in the shallow, brush-grown cañons, and had burned and broken what they found. That Ravenutzi had joined the Far-Folk we knew, for once when they had come to parley over a wounded man, they saw the hostage at Oca’s back directing the Council by such knowledge of the Outliers as he had acquired by long residence. Oca blew out his long beard, laughing as he listened. I knew too from one of the captive women, that he still concealed from his wife the place where he had hidden the Ward. The explanation Ravenutzi had given to Oca of the use he should make of Zirriloë’s person in the game that was yet to be played, set that chief chuckling in his beard like a cataract. But to his wife Ravenutzi had denied seriousness: laughed, kissed her burned throat, blinded, bound her with an ingenuity of charm and tenderness until she grew tame under his hand. Then she would rage the more bitterly when he was away, suspecting him with the girl in hiding; flaming with jealousy until his return found her burned out, white and faint, creeping humbly to his caress.