‘Take off your belt,’ I said curtly, ‘and throw it down. But, mark me, if you turn I fire.’ The spirit was quite gone out of him, and he obeyed mechanically. I jumped down, still covering him with the gun, and picked up the belt, pistols and all. Then I remounted, and we went on. By-and-by he asked me sullenly what I was going to do. ‘Go back,’ I said, ‘and take the road to Auch when I come to it.’ ‘It will be dark in an hour,’ he answered sulkily. ‘I know that,’ I retorted. ‘We must camp and do the best we can.’ And as I said, we did. The daylight held until we gained the skirts of the pine-wood at the head of the pass. Here I chose a corner a little off the track, and well sheltered from the wind, and bade him light a fire. I tethered the horses near this and within sight. Then it remained only to sup. I had a piece of bread: he had another and an onion. We ate in silence, sitting on opposite sides of the fire. But after supper I found myself in a dilemma; I did not see how I was to sleep. The ruddy light which gleamed on the knave’s swart face and sinewy hands showed also his eyes, black, sullen, and watchful. I knew that the man was plotting revenge; that he would not hesitate to plant his knife between my ribs should I give him the chance; and I could find only one alternative to remaining awake. Had I been bloody-minded, I should have chosen it and solved the question at once and in my favour by shooting him as he sat. But I have never been a cruel man, and I could not find it in my heart to do this. The silence of the mountain and the sky-which seemed a thing apart from the roar of the torrent and not to be broken by it--awed me. The vastness of the solitude in which we sat, the dark void above, through which the stars kept shooting, the black gulf below in which the unseen waters boiled and surged, the absence of other human company or other signs of human existence, put such a face upon the deed that I gave up the thought of it with a shudder, and resigned myself, instead, to watch through the night--the long, cold, Pyrenean night. Presently he curled himself up like a dog and slept in the blaze, and then for a couple of hours I sat opposite him, thinking. It seemed years since I had seen Zaton’s or thrown the dice. The old life, the old employments--should I ever go back to them?--seemed dim and distant. Would Cocheforet, the forest and the mountain, the grey Chateau and its mistresses, seem one day as dim? And if one bit of life could fade so quickly at the unrolling of another, and seem in a moment pale and colourless, would all life some day and somewhere, and all the things we--But enough! I was growing foolish. I sprang up and kicked the wood together, and, taking up the gun, began to pace to and fro under the cliff. Strange that a little moonlight, a few stars, a breath of solitude should carry a man back to childhood and childish things. . . . . . .