"I think I'd best not, Ru, unless--art thou tired?" "I'll never tire. And then the Spice Islands?" _Chapter Four_ In windless calm under the pines, Reuben's dark-dilated eyes could still find the furrows where sled-runners had passed, and the half-moons of dainty hoof prints. Nothing stirred within the vague archway continually opening before him. Gradually, tree and rock and snow came to possess sharper lines, stronger shadows; somewhere, a birth of new light--"Ben," he said, "it's the moon." "Where, Ru? I can't find it." "Somewhere ahead...." Since they came under the shelter of the trees--and that was a long time ago--Reuben had felt no longer the cold kiss of snowflakes. It had been nothing but a flurry, now ended. At a curve in the road he discovered, through a break in the treetops, a grayness brightening. He halted; Ben blundered into him, arms slipping clumsily around him as if in need of support. Dull rags of cloud dropped away from the naked radiance. "I told you, Ben. There she rides." Ben was smiling. "Ben--all's well?... I did right? We could not have stayed, and thou to be flogged, maybe put in the stocks." "The stocks, was it?" "Yes, old Anna was yattering about that too when they came home from the sermon, and Grandmother never said her nay." "Of course thou'st done right.... They'll search. That snow wasn't enough to hide anything." "No.... We've walked more than an hour--must have done five miles." "We can walk another five." Though standing quietly, Ben was breathing too fast, his eyes too steadily fixed on the new light in the sky. In the woods Ben always had been leader. And there it was Ben's natural way to send his glance flickering everywhere. Reuben recalled the voice of Jesse Plum: "No Inj'an'll ever surprise you, Ben. Swoonds, you could look at a squirrel while the little bugger jumps from one branch to the next, and tell me its age and gender, and if she be female whether she got little 'uns." Jesse had not croaked that in flattery. Wilderness had been near and vital to Jesse; he never made a mock of it, and was capable of scolding either boy for walking noisily in dead leaves. "Ben, do you feel----" "All's well. Let's go on." Reuben walked on ahead, trying to set an easier pace. Surely, surely there was no _reason_ why Ben should fall ill.... In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land, killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they walked. Ben did not speak. The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.