“I remembered something like that in the Bible; but, if after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn’t for me to undeceive them.

“‘A God can do anything,’ says I.  ’If the King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.’  ‘She’ll have to,’ said Billy Fish.  ’There are all sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any more.  Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone.  Only the Gods know that.  We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.’

“I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing.  All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard the girl crying fit to die.  One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.

“‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan.  ’I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife.’  ’The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the priest.  ’She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.’

“‘Hearten her very tender, then,’ says Dravot, ’or I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so you’ll never want to be heartened again.’  He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the morning.  I wasn’t any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you was a crowned King twenty times over, could not but be risky.  I got up very early in the morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

“‘What is up, Fish?’ I say to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in his furs and looking splendid to behold.

“‘I can’t rightly say,’ says he; ’but if you can make the King drop all this nonsense about marriage, you’ll be doing him and me and yourself a great service.’

“‘That I do believe,’ says I.  ’But sure, you know, Billy, as well as me, having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing more than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made.  Nothing more, I do assure you.’

“‘That may be,’ says Billy Fish, ‘and yet I should be sorry if it was.’  He sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks.  ‘King,’ says he, ’be you man or God or Devil, I’ll stick by you to-day.  I have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow me.  We’ll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over.’

“A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white except the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north.  Dravot came out with his crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch.