Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging words to P.D.  His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the effect of his leanness.  The moonlight on his face, which had lost its tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with the surroundings.  You would have said that he could ride on forever without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even seeing any danger sign.  He had never been like this in all Firio’s memory.  The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity.  If Jack would not talk Firio would.  Yes, he would ask a question, just to hear the sound of a voice.

“We go to fight?”

“No, Firio.”

“Not to fight Prather?”

“No.”

“To fight Leddy?”

“I hope not.”

“Why we go?  Why so—­why so—­” he had not the language to express the strange, brooding inquiry of his mind.

“I go to save Little Rivers.”

“Si!” said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question.

“I go to get the end of a story, Firio—­my story!” continued Jack.  “I have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from John Prather.”

“Si, si!” said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves of a pack of cards through its fingers.  “And then?”

At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be the same to him until it was tanned.

“Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a siege—­a siege in the open, without parallels or mines!  A siege in the open!”

Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack’s lips and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind.

“But you must fight Leddy! Si, si!  You must fight Leddy first!”

“Then I must, I suppose,” said Jack, absently.  “All things in their turn and time.”

“Si!” answered Firio.  All things in their turn and time!  This desert truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal Painter himself.

Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling ball.  The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding, plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight, while the curtain melted away before blue