But the Outliers were not quite in the same case. They were wronged, robbed, betrayed, they distrusted every move of their enemies, kept watches out. From the meeting of the river and the Ledge to the Gap, where the dip of the ranges east began, there was a line of solitary outposts, patrolling all the passages. While the Far-Folk played fox in the thorny covers south, there was in reality a stopped earth between them and their women and the places they had known. The posts beat eastward half a day each from his own station to the next and back. One of these, going as still as a snake, saw a tall woman with long, coiling hair wrapped about her body, wasted and lovely, following a track in the woods. She followed so patiently, and with so much intention and such sureness, poring above it as though every footprint stabbed her and she hugged the stabbing to her breast; urged forward on it with such anguished purpose, held back from it by such torturing fears! Who else but a jealous woman follows in such fashion on the trail of the man she loves? The Outlier counted himself a poor guesser if this were not Ravenutzi’s wife following Ravenutzi. He followed, too, at a discreet distance. He might, perhaps, have come alongside her without attracting her attention, so intently was it fixed upon what lay before her, what she could not withhold herself from seeking, and was afraid to find. Now she hurried on with a kind of fury of discernment. Now she turned aside to compose her anguished bosom the better to read its traces where the trail looped and turned to baffle and bewilder. He followed. Trees gave place to scrub, and that to knee-high chaparral, and that to open hill crowns and broken stony ledges. Here he must skulk behind hills and at a considerable distance, because of the betraying openness. Presently he lost her. He had made sure that she was headed for a certain sag in the crest of a hill, and that by coming around the brow of another one he would have full sight of her again, that he was astounded and chagrined to discover, as it seemed, that she had sunk into the earth. There was no cover and no woman. Below him lay a slight hollow full of loose boulders. Toward this the trail, if trail there was, must have led, and he would have hurried on except for being so sure she had not had time to make it. He lay still where he was, under the jut of a bald hill, and considered. Presently he saw a fox come out of its hole on the opposite side and begin to trot across the hollow; it started between tall boulders, but swerved, went sidewise, muzzle pointed with suspicion. Within the ring of boulders then lay something that was neither stick nor stone. From his post the watcher could not say very well what it was until the shadows had shrunk by about an hour. And then he saw the woman. She lay flat, face downward, waiting. “If you wait, my girl,” said he to himself, “it is because he you follow is at the end of his trail and returns upon it soon.”