Whatever impulses guided Rodriguez as he rode and Morano followed, he knew not what they were or even that there could be any.  He followed the road without hope and only travelled to change his camping-grounds.  And that night he was half-way between the village and Shadow Valley.

Morano never spoke, for he saw that his master’s disappointment was still raw; but it pleased him to notice, as he had done all day, that they were heading for the great forest.  He cooked their evening meal in their camp by the wayside and they both ate it in silence.  For awhile Rodriguez sat and gazed at the might-have-beens in the camp-fire:  and when these began to be hidden by white ash he went to his blankets and slept.  And Morano went quietly about the little camp, doing all that needed to be done, with never a word.  When the horses were seen to and fed, when the knives were cleaned, when everything was ready for the start next morning, Morano went to his blankets and slept too.  And in the morning again they wandered on.

That evening they saw the low gold rays of the sun enchanting the tops of a forest.  It almost surprised Rodriguez, travelling without an aim, to recognise Shadow Valley.  They quickened their slow pace and, before twilight faded, they were under the great oaks; but the last of the twilight could not pierce the dimness of Shadow Valley, and it seemed as if night had entered the forest with them.

They chose a camping-ground as well as they could in the darkness and Morano tied the horses to trees a little way off from the camp.  Then he returned to Rodriguez and tied a blanket to the windward side of two trees to make a kind of bedroom for his master, for they had all the blankets they needed.  And when this was done he set the emblem and banner of camps, anywhere all over the world in any time, for he gathered sticks and branches and lit a camp-fire.  The first red flames went up and waved and proclaimed a camp:  the light made a little circle, shadows ran away to the forest, and the circle of light on the ground and on the trees that stood round it became for that one night home.

They heard the horses stamp as they always did in the early part of the night; and then Morano went to give them their fodder.  Rodriguez sat and gazed into the fire, his mind as full of thoughts as the fire was full of pictures:  one by one the pictures in the fire fell in; and all his thoughts led nowhere.

He heard Morano running back the thirty or forty yards he had gone from the camp-fire “Master,” Morano said, “the three horses are gone.”

“Gone?” said Rodriguez.  There was little more to say; it was too dark to track them and he knew that to find three horses in Shadow Valley was a task that might take years.  And after more thought than might seem to have been needed he said; “We must go on foot.”

“Have we far to go, master?” said Morano, for the first time daring to question him since they left the cottage in Spain.