"Ay," said the Colonel. "We have done all we could." Then, to Landless, "With the moonrise we drop down the river--from out your sight forever. I have told you frankly there is no hope for you amongst your kind in the world to which we return. I believe there to be none. But have you thought of what we must needs leave you to? Humanly speaking, it is death, and death alone, in the winter forest." "I have thought," said Landless. "From my soul I wish that some miracle may occur to save you yet!" "An ill wish!" said the other, smiling, "with but little chance, however, of its fulfillment." "I fear not," said the Colonel with something like a groan, "but I wish it, nevertheless. Here is my hand, and with it my heartfelt thanks for your service to my daughter. And I wish you to believe that I deeply deplore your fate, and that I would have saved you if I could." "I believe it," Landless said simply. The Colonel took and wrung his hand, then turned sharply away, and beckoning the overseer to follow, strode out of the circle of rocks. Sir Charles raised his feathered hat. "We have been foes," he said, "but the strife is over--and when all is said, we are both Englishmen. I trust we bear each other no ill will." "I bear none," said Landless. Sir Charles, his eyes still fixed upon the pale quiet of the other's face, passed out of the opening between the rocks, and his place was taken by the Surveyor-General. "I would have saved you if I could," he said in a low and troubled voice. "I bow to a brave man and a gallant gentleman," and he too was gone. In the glade below, the movement, the laughter and the song sank gradually into silence as the gentlemen adventurers, the rangers, Indian guides, and servants composing the rescuing party threw themselves down, one by one, beside the blazing fires for a short rest before moonrise and the long pull down the river. Among the crags, high above the twinkling watch-fires and the wash of the dark river, there was the stillness of the stars, of the white frost and the bare cliffs. In the northern heavens played a soft light, and now and then a star shot. The man who marked its trail across the studded skies thought of himself as of one as far withdrawn as it from the world of lower lights in the forest at his feet. Already he felt a prescience of the loneliness of the morrow, and the morrow, and the morrow, of the slow drift of the days in the waning forest, the hopeless nights, the terror of that great solitude--and felt, too, a feverish desire to hasten that approach, to embrace that which was to be henceforth bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. He wished for the dash of oars in the dark stream below and for the rise of the moon which was to shine coldly down upon him, companionless, immured in that vast fortress from which he might never hope to escape.