"The road you called, and I believed to be, an unblazed trail through a grave forest, I am beginning to see is just the old sordid, musty Bridge of Sighs across which common malefactors are led," wrote John Allard to Robert three months after his departure from Sun-Kist. "But if we can agree with Browning's dictum, there is a certain virtue simply in keeping on at a task assumed, even if the end be questionable. And I am keeping on. Do not fancy I am saying this to trouble you, or in weak regret. All is going better than we dared hope, as you know; and I see no danger near, at present. No; it is only that I have been fearing I gave you some edged doctrines; do not close your hand upon them, for they cut. You can not write to me, of course, since you do not know where I am. Nor shall I myself write again, even with this guarded and unsigned precaution. When this venture ends, I am going away from America; I think I shall enlist in France's Foreign Legion. Not because I am afraid, but because I want to work. Yet, in spite of success, it seems to me that, like Saxon Harold, I hear a cry in the night: '_Sanguelac, the arrow, the arrow!_'" * * * * * There was nothing in the quiet, sun-filled, little hut nestled on the mountain-side, to indicate that here rested one end of the _Ponte degli Sospiri_. Yet to one of the two men here at bay, the dark bridge arched away as a thing visible. A siege had been held there all the June afternoon, until now this grateful lull had fallen,--a siege whose tale was punctuated with the snap of bullets, the crash of loosened stones down the cliff, and the shouts of men below. No one yet had ventured on the steep, narrow path winding up to the hut, although there was but one defender, and so far the battle had been bloodless. But neither the big Irishman leaning by the door, nor John Allard, lying helpless on a rough cot, had any doubt of the final result. They were simply waiting for the end to come. "Desmond, have you hurt any of them?" Allard asked suddenly, rousing himself from a reverie bordering on stupor. "I have not," answered the other in accents just touched with Hibernian softness. "But I am thinking they will not come up until dusk. Bird shot scatters." "Our own men have gone safely?" "They have. And if you had not slipped through that hole in the old floor and broken your ankle--" Allard raised himself on his elbow. Fever lent an artificial brightness to his firm young face and shadowed gray eyes, the waving chestnut hair clung boyishly around a forehead which had acquired one straight line between the brows during the five months since he had left Sun-Kist. "You should not have stayed, Desmond," he said earnestly. "You can not help me; I have my own way out of this. You must go now, at least, and try the mountain. I ask you to go."