They did not ask him how he came to be chosen for hanging, because in every country there are about a hundred individualists, varying to perhaps half a hundred in poor ages.  They go their hundred ways, or their half-dozen ways; and there is a hundred and first way, or a seventh way, which is the way that is cut for the rest:  and if some of the rest catch one of the hundred, or one of the six, they naturally hang him, if they have a rope, and if hanging is the custom of the country, for different countries use different methods.  And you saw by this man’s eyes that he was one of the hundred.  Rodriguez therefore only sought to know how he came to be caught.

“La Garda found you, senor?” he said.

“As you see,” said the stranger.  “I came too far from my home.”

“You were travelling?” said Rodriguez.

“Shopping,” he said.

At this word Morano’s interest awakened wide.  “Senor,” he said, “what is the right price for a bottle of this wine that la Garda drink?”

“I know not,” said the man in the brown jacket; “they give me these things.”

“Where is your home, senor?” Rodriguez asked.

“It is Shadow Valley,” he said.

One never saw Rodriguez fail to understand anything:  if he could not clear a situation up he did not struggle with it.  Morano rubbed his chin:  he had heard of Shadow Valley only dimly, for all the travellers he had known out of the north had gone round it.  Rodriguez and Morano bent their heads and watched a design that was growing out of the gold.  And as the design grew under the hand of the strange worker he began to talk of the horses.  He spoke as though his plans had been clearly established by edict, and as though no others could be.

“When I have gone with two horses,” he said, “ride hard with the other two till you reach the village named Lowlight, and take them to the forge of Fernandez the smith, where one will shoe them who is not Fernandez.”

And he waved his hand northwards.  There was only one road.  Then all his attention fell back again to his work on the gold coin; and when those blue eyes were turned away there seemed nothing left to question.  And now Rodriguez saw the design was a crown, a plain gold circlet with oak leaves rising up from it.  And this woodland emblem stood up out of the gold, for the worker had hollowed the coin away all around it, and was sloping it up to the edge.  Little was said by the watchers in the wonder of seeing the work, for no craft is very far from the line beyond which is magic, and the man in the leather coat was clearly a craftsman:  and he said nothing for he worked at a craft.  And when the arboreal crown was finished, and its edges were straight and sharp, an hour had passed since he began near noon.  Then he drilled a hole near the rim and, drawing a thin green ribbon from his pocket, he passed it through the hole and, rising, he suddenly hung it round Rodriguez’ neck.