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1
Introduction

Drugs, whether obtained from plant, animal or mineral sources or synthesized

chemically, are rarely administered in their pure chemical form. Often, they are
combined with a number of inert substances (excipients/adjuvants) and transformed into
a convenient dosage form that can be administered by a suitable route. Earlier, it was
believed that the therapeutic response to a drug is an attribute of its intrinsic
pharmacological activity. But today, it is very much understood that the dose-response
relationship obtained after drug administration by different routes—for example, oral and
parenteral, are not the same. Variations are also observed when the same drug is
administered as different dosage forms or similar dosage forms produced by different
manufacturers, which in turn depend upon the physicochemical properties of the drug, the
excipients present in the dosage form, the method of formulation and the manner of
administration. A new and separate discipline called biopharmaceutics has therefore
been developed to account for all such factors that influence the therapeutic effectiveness
of a drug.
Biopharmaceutics is defined as the study of factors influencing the rate and amount
of drug that reaches the systemic circulation and the use of this information to optimise
the therapeutic efficacy of the drug products. The process of movement of drug from its
site of administration to the systemic circulation is called as absorption. The
concentration of drug in plasma and hence the onset of action, and the intensity and
duration of response depend upon the bioavailability of drug from its dosage form.
Bioavailability is defined as the rate and extent (amount) of drug absorption. Any
alteration in the drug’s bioavailability is reflected in its pharmacological effects. Other
processes that play a role in the therapeutic activity of a drug are distribution and
elimination. Together, they are known as drug disposition. The movement of drug
between one compartment and the other (generally blood and the extravascular tissues)
is referred to as drug distribution. Since the site of action is usually located in the
extravascular tissues, the onset, intensity and sometimes duration of action depend upon
the distribution behaviour of the drug. The magnitude (intensity) and the duration of
action depend largely upon the effective concentration and the time period for which this
concentration is maintained at the site of action which in turn depend upon the
elimination processes. Elimination is defined as the process that tends to remove the
drug from the body and terminate its action. Elimination occurs by two processes—
biotransformation (metabolism), which usually inactivates the drug, and excretion
which is responsible for the exit of drug/metabolites from the body.
In order to administer drugs optimally, knowledge is needed not only of the
mechanisms of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) but also
of the rate (kinetics) at which they occur i.e. pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics is
defined as the study of time course of drug ADME and their relationship with its
therapeutic and toxic effects of the drug. Simply speaking, pharmacokinetics is the
kinetics of ADME or KADME. The use of pharmacokinetic principles in optimising the
drug dosage to suit individual patient needs and achieving maximum therapeutic utility is
called as clinical pharmacokinetics. Figure 1.1 is a schematic representation of
processes comprising the pharmacokinetics of a drug.

Fig. 1.1. Schematic illustration of pharmacokinetic processes

Drug administration and therapy can now be conveniently divided into four phases or
processes:
1. The Pharmaceutical Phase: It is concerned with –
(a) Physicochemical properties of the drug, and
(b) Design and manufacture of an effective drug product for administration by
a suitable route.
2. The Pharmacokinetic Phase: It is concerned with the ADME of drugs as elicited
by the plasma drug concentration-time profile and its relationship with the dose,
dosage form and frequency and route of administration. In short, it is the sum of all
the processes inflicted by the body on the drug.
3. The Pharmacodynamic Phase: It is concerned with the biochemical and
physiologic effects of the drug and its mechanism of action. It is characterized by
the concentration of drug at the site of action and its relation to the magnitude of
effects observed. Thus, in comparison –
Pharmacokinetics is a study of what the body does to the drug, whereas
Pharmacodynamics is a study of what the drug does to the body.
Pharmacokinetics relates changes in concentration of drug within the body with
time after its administration, whereas
Pharmacodynamics relates response to concentration of drug in the body.
4. The Therapeutic Phase: It is concerned with the translation of pharmacological
effect into clinical benefit.
A schematic representation of the various processes involved in the therapy with a
drug is given in Fig. 1.2.
 Fig. 1.2. Schematic representation of the processes involved in drug therapeutics

To achieve optimal therapy with a drug, the drug product must be designed to
deliver the active principle at an optimal rate and amount, depending upon the patient’s
needs. Knowledge of the factors affecting the bioavailability of drug helps in designing
such an optimum formulation and saves many drugs that may be discarded as useless.
On the other hand, rational use of the drug or the therapeutic objective can only be
achieved through a better understanding of pharmacokinetics (in addition to
pharmacodynamics of the drug), which helps in designing a proper dosage regimen (the
manner in which the drug should be taken). This obviates the use of the empirical
approach where a considerable experimentation is needed to arrive at the balance
between the desired therapeutic and the undesired toxic effects in order to define an
appropriate dosage regimen.

The knowledge and concepts of biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetics thus

have an integral role in the design and development of new drugs and their dosage forms
and improvement of therapeutic efficacy of existing drugs.
2
Absorption of Drugs
A drug injected intravascularly (intravenously and/or intra-arterially) directly
enters the systemic circulation and exerts its pharmacological effects.
However, majority of drugs are administered extravascularly, generally orally.
If intended to act systemically, such drugs can exert their pharmacological
actions only when they come into blood circulation from their site of
application, and for this, absorption is an important prerequisite step.
Drug absorption is defined as the process of movement of unchanged
drug from the site of administration to systemic circulation. Following
absorption, the effectiveness of a drug can only be assessed by its
concentration at the site of action. However, it is difficult to measure the drug
concentration at such a site. Instead, the concentration can be measured more
accurately in plasma. There always exist a correlation between the plasma
concentration of a drug and the therapeutic response and thus, absorption can
also be defined as the process of movement of unchanged drug from the site of
administration to the site of measurement i.e. plasma. This definition takes
into account the loss of drug that occurs after oral administration due to
presystemic metabolism or first-pass effect.

Fig. 2.1. Plots showing significance of rate and extent of absorption in drug
therapy.
Not only the magnitude of drug that comes into the systemic circulation but
also the rate at which it is absorbed is important. This is clear from Fig. 2.1.
A drug that is completely but slowly absorbed may fail to show therapeutic
response as the plasma concentration for desired effect is never achieved. On
the contrary, a rapidly absorbed drug attains the therapeutic level easily to
elicit pharmacological effect. Thus, both the rate and the extent of drug
absorption are important. Such an absorption pattern has several advantages:
 1. Lesser susceptibility of the drug for degradation or interaction due
to rapid absorption.
2. Higher blood levels and rapid onset of action.
3. More uniform, greater and reproducible therapeutic response.
Drugs that have to enter the systemic circulation to exert their effect can be
administered by three major routes:
1. The Enteral Route: includes peroral i.e. gastrointestinal,
sublingual/buccal and rectal routes. The GI route is the most common
for administration of majority of drugs.
2. The Parenteral Route: includes all routes of administration through
or under one or more layers of skin. While no absorption is required
when the drug is administered i.v., it is necessary for extravascular
parenteral routes like the subcutaneous and the intramuscular routes.
3. The Topical Route: includes skin, eyes or other specific membranes.
The intranasal, inhalation, intravaginal and transdermal routes may be
considered enteral or topical according to different definitions.
Table 2.1 compares the bioavailability/absorption pattern and advantages
and disadvantages of drugs administered by common routes.
TABLE 2.1.
Bioavailability/absorption of drug from common routes of drug
administration
Route Bioavailability Advantages Disadvantages
Parenteral
Intravenous Complete (100%) Drug is given for Increased chance
(IV) systemic drug immediate or for adverse
absorption. controlled effect. reaction.
May inject large Possible
fluid volumes. anaphylaxis.
Suitable for irritating Requires skill in
drugs insertion of infusion
set.
Tissue damage at
site of injection
(infiltration,
necrosis, or sterile
abscess).
Intramuscular Rapid absorption Easier to inject than Irritating drugs
injection (IM) from aqueous intravenous may be very
solutions. injection. painful.
Slow absorption Larger volumes Variable rates of
from non-aqueous may be used absorption
(oily) solutions. compared to depending upon
subcutaneous muscle group
solution. injected and blood
flow.
Subcutaneous Rapid absorption Generally, used for Rate of drug
injection (SC) from aqueous vaccines and drugs absorption depends
solution. not absorbed orally upon blood flow
Slow absorption e.g. insulin. and injection
from depot volume.
formulations.
Enteral Routes
Buccal or Rapid absorption of No presystemic Some drug may be
sublingual lipid-soluble drugs. metabolism. swallowed. Not for
(SL) most drugs or
drugs with high
doses.
Oral (PO) Absorption may Safest and easiest Some drugs are
vary. Generally route of drug unstable in GIT, or
slower absorption administration. undergo
rate compared to IV Suitable for both presystemic
bolus or IM injection. immediate-release metabolism or
and modified- show erratic
release drug absorption.
products.
Rectal (PR) Absorption may Useful when patient Absorption may be
vary from cannot swallow erratic. Suppository
suppository. medication. may migrate to
More reliable Used for local and different position.
absorption from systemic effects. Some patient
enema (solution). discomfort.
Other Routes
Transdermal Slow absorption, Transdermal Some irritation by
rate may vary. delivery system patch or drug.
Increased (patch) is easy to Permeability of
absorption with use and withdraw. skin variable with
occlusive dressings. Continuous release condition, anatomic
for a specified site, age, and
period. gender.
Used for lipid- Type of cream or
soluble drugs with ointment base
low dose and low affects drug release
MW. and absorption.
Low presystemic
metabolism.
Inhalation Rapid absorption. May be used for Particle size of
Total dose local or systemic drug determines
absorbed is effects. anatomic
variable. placement in
respiratory tract.
May stimulate
cough reflex.
Some drug may be
swallowed.

GASTROINTESTINAL ABSORPTION OF DRUGS

The oral route of drug administration is the most common for systemically
acting drugs and therefore, more emphasis will be given to gastrointestinal
(GI) absorption of drugs. Moreover, it covers all the aspects of variability
observed in drug absorption. Before proceeding to discuss absorption aspects,
a brief description of cell membrane structure and physiology is necessary.
Cell Membrane: Structure and Physiology
For a drug to be absorbed and distributed into organs and tissues and
eliminated from the body, it must pass through one or more biological
membranes/barriers at various locations. Such a movement of drug across the
membrane is called as drug transport.
The basic structure of cell membrane is shown in Fig. 2.2.

Fig. 2.2. Basic structure of functional cell membrane

The cellular membrane consists of a double layer of amphiphilic
phospholipid molecules arranged in such a fashion that their hydrocarbon
chains are oriented inwards to form the hydrophobic or lipophilic phase and
their polar heads oriented to form the outer and inner hydrophilic boundaries
of the cellular membrane that face the surrounding aqueous environment.
Globular protein molecules are associated on either side of these hydrophilic
boundaries and also interspersed within the membrane structure. In short, the
membrane is a mayonnaise sandwich where a bimolecular layer of lipids is
contained between two parallel monomolecular layers of proteins. The
hydrophobic core of the membrane is responsible for the relative
impermeability of polar molecules. Aqueous filled pores or perforations of 4
to 10 Å in diameter are also present in the membrane structure through which
inorganic ions and small organic water-soluble molecules like urea can pass.
In general, the biomembrane acts like a semipermeable barrier permitting
rapid and limited passage of some compounds while restricting that of others.
The GI lining constituting the absorption barrier allows most nutrients like
glucose, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, etc. to pass rapidly through it into
the systemic circulation but prevents the entry of certain toxins and
medicaments. Thus, for a drug to get absorbed after oral administration, it
must first pass through this biological barrier.

MECHANISMS OF DRUG ABSORPTION

The three broad categories of drug transport mechanisms involved in
absorption are –
A. Transcellular/intracellular transport
Other documents randomly have
different content
Seventy bracelets of gold, he said, all of fine work, chased and
hammered, and belts of linked gold, and buckles set with colored
stones. He took pebbles from the creek and petals of flowers to show
them how that was, and every child was for making one for himself,
for Noche to approve. Also he said there were collars of filigree, and
necklets set with green stones of the color of the creek where it
turned over the falls at Leaping Water. There were cups of gold, and
one particular goblet of chased work which an old king held between
his knees, around the rim of which a matchless hunter forever
pursued exquisite deer. The stem of it was all of honey-colored agate,
and in the base there were four great stones for the colors of the four
Quarters: blue for the North, green for the South where the wind
came from that made the grass to spring, red for the Dawn side of
earth, and yellow for the West. And for the same king there was a
circlet for his brows, of fire-stones, by which I supposed he meant
opals, half a finger long, set in beaten gold. Also there were lamps,
jeweled and chased, on golden chains that hung a-light above the
kings.
When then one of the children, who lay listening with his heels in
the air, wished to know if it were true what his father had said, that
there was evil in the Treasure which came out upon whoever so
much as looked at it, there came a rueful blankness upon the face of
old Noche.
“Ay,” said he, “and upon whoever so much as talks of it.” And he
shook his neglected sling at them as though to have left it off for the
sake of a story were a very culpable matter.
But the children would not have it like that at all. They flung
themselves on him in a heap, and got upon his back and about his
neck and rumpled his hair, declaring that he was the best old man
that ever was, and he must tell them about the red necklace: till,
growling a little, but very glad to be beguiled, Noche went on to say
there was a necklace of red stones so splendid that every one of them
was a little more splendid than the next one. Almost before he had
begun and before Herman and I had heard anything louder than the
unmeaning forest murmurs, we saw the children rise to attention,
and scatter suddenly, with gay little splutters of laughter like the
noise of water spilled along the ground. They disappeared down the
trails that ran darkling among the rooted columns of the trees.
 There was a certain dismay I thought on Noche’s face as he turned
back to his work, perceiving that I had listened, and not sure how
much I had understood. He began to talk to us at once about his
work, as though that might have been the object of our attention.
With his hand he reached out furtively behind him and destroyed all
the patterns in the dust.
Still I found my mind going back to the story with some insistence.
Up to that time I had seen no metal in the camp but some small
pieces of hammered silver and simple tools of hard iron, and no
ornaments but shells and berries. But there had been a relish in old
Noche’s telling that hinted at reality. I remembered the pattern
which he had pondered so secretly under the cypress trees, and it
came into my mind in an obscure way, without my taking any
particular notice of it, that this might be the pattern of the necklace
of red stones. I had not time to think further then, for the sound to
which the children had answered was the returning hunt and the
Outliers coming toward us on the trail.
It was always so that they came together about the time that the
blue haze and the late light rayed out long level bars across the hills.
They would be awake and about at whatever hour pleased them, and
take their nooning in whatever place. Through the days there would
scarcely be so much seen of them as a woman beating fiber between
two stones by a brook, or a man cutting fern on a steep slope. So still
they were by use, and so habituated to the russet earth and the green
fern and the gray stone, that they could melt into it and disappear.
Though you heard close about you low-toned talk and cheerful
laughter, you could scarcely, unless they wished it, come bodily upon
them.
On this evening all those in the neighborhood of Deep Fern had
come together, not only because of the news of House-Folk brought
to camp, but because this was the time set for the return of
Trastevera from some errand connected with the great occasion of
which I had been told. It was she who had seen trouble walking with
us on the trail from Broken Tree, and without whose advisement, so
Evarra had already explained to me, nothing would be determined
concerning Herman and me.
This Trastevera was also the wife of Persilope, and whatever the
business that called her from Deep Fern that day, she was late
returning. All the Outliers had come in. The light had left the lower
reaches of the forest and began to shine level through the fan-spread
boughs before Persilope came out of the grass walk where he had
been pacing up and down restlessly. Advised by some sound or sense
too fine for me, he lifted up his hand toward that quarter of the thick-
set grove that fenced the far end of the meadow. In the quick
attentiveness that followed on the gesture, he stood in the flush of
rising tenderness until, with some others behind her, she came
lightly through the wood. One perceived first that she was smaller
than the others, most delicately shaped, and next, that the years
upon her were like the enrichment of time on some rare ornament.
I do not know why in our sort of society it should always seem
regrettable, when not a little ridiculous, for a woman to be ten years
older than her husband. Since I have known the exquisite maturity of
Trastevera’s spirit, tempering her husband’s passion to finer
appreciation of her ripened worth, I have not thought it so. As she
came lightly through the thick grass of the uncropped meadow there
was, as often, a glow upon her that might have come from the
business she had been abroad upon. It sustained her a little above
the personal consideration, so that almost before she had recovered
from the flush of her husband’s embrace, she turned toward
Prassade—the red man who had found me in the wood—to say that
all was as he would have wished it, and he had good reason for being
pleased. This being apparently a word he had waited for, he thanked
her with a very honest satisfaction. Then, with her hand still in
Persilope’s, he looking down on her more rejoiced with having her
back from her errand than with anything she had to say about it, she
turned a puzzled, inquiring glance about the camp.
“Ravenutzi?” she questioned doubtfully; but the smith smiled and
shook his head, and with one consent, as if she had answered
expectation, the company parted and showed us to her where we
stood. Without having any previous intention about it, I found myself
rising to my feet to meet her, and heard Herman scramble lamely up
behind.
She stood so, confronting us without a word for as long as it took
Prassade briefly to explain how they had taken us, and why they had
not done that to us which I already understood had threatened me on
the first day of my captivity. This was long enough for me to discern
that she was darker than the other Outliers, that her hair must have
been about the color of Ravenutzi’s before it turned. Her eyes were
gray and clouded with amber like the morning surf. She moved a step
toward me, nodding her head to what the young chief said, and
shaking it slowly to something in herself. Wonder and perplexity
deepened in her. Delicately, as seeking knowledge of me and not
realizing that I could understand her speech or answer in it, she drew
the tips of her fingers across my breast. There was no more
offensiveness in the touch than in the questioning fingers of the
blind. Wonder and perplexity deepening still, she turned back to
Persilope.
“I grow an old woman,” she said, “I have failed you.”
He took the hand which she put out deprecatingly, and held it
strongly against his breast, laughing the full, fatuous man’s laugh of
disbelief.
“When have you failed me?”
“I do not know,” she protested; “I cannot tell;” and I understood
that the doubt referred to her failure to get from me by that contact,
the clew she sought.
“Surely these are they whom I feared for you to meet when you set
out for the sea by the cypresses. Not for what they would do to you”—
her look was toward Persilope—“but for what they might bring to all
Outliers. But now I am not sure.”
She spoke as much to the company at large as to her husband. The
number of them had increased, until I could see the outer ring
melting into the twilight of the trees, eyes in formless faces of
amazement and alarm. Now at the admission of a difficulty, they all
turned toward her with that courtesy of inward attention by which,
when one of them would understand more of a matter than lay
directly before him, each turned his thought upon the subject gravely
for a time, like so many lamps lighted in a room, and turned it off
again with no more concern when the matter was resolved. But even
as she smiled to acknowledge their help she shook her head.
“No,” she repeated, “I cannot tell.” She turned and looked at me,
and I gave her the look back with so deep a wish to have her
understand that no trouble should come to them by me, that she
must have sensed it, for her look went on by me and stopped at
Herman.
“You?” she questioned.
“Tell her,” said Herman, who had not caught all the words, but
only the general purport of her speech, “tell her that all we ask is to
go to our own homes, unharmed and harming no one.”
Now that was not exactly what I had in mind, for though I would
not for worlds have made trouble for the Outliers, I wished nothing
so little as being sent away before I had got to know more of them.
But before I could frame a speech to that end, Trastevera spoke again
more lightly.
“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but
kindness and well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that
House-Folk should discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to
pay them some little respect for it.”
She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment,
but before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed
watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had
neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his
finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of
Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had
observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any
matter of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a
little to one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him
pushed into the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in
my mind that the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I
had not before mentioned, might mean something. I hardly
understood what.
I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance
which the smith detected. While the words were in my throat he
looked at me, subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had
projected his personality forward until it filled satisfyingly all my
thought. I no longer thought it worth while to mention where I had
first seen Ravenutzi nor what I had found him doing. I was taken
with a sudden inexplicable warmth toward him, and a vague wish to
afford him a protection for which he had not asked and did not
apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw that Trastevera had
noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind had lain at the
crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and been taken in
the shadow.
“For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as
though this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had
better take counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at
once, or be kept to await a sign.”
I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she
had come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She
shook her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly
at the smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she
walked slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then
we were taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts.
The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of
three half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the
intervening hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the
cupped space like the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad
oaks and brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek
that, dropping in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern,
made a pool there, from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow.
The upper basin, long and narrow, was named from the falls,
Leaping Water.
The camp of the Outliers lay in one of the widest of the furrows
between the ridges where the redwoods marched soldierly down to
the stream side. Above it, between Deep Fern and a place called Bent
Bow, lay Council Hollow. It was there, when the moon was an hour
high, a battered-looking moon, yellow and low, went all the Outliers
to consider what was to be done about us. It was a windy hollow, oval
shaped, with long white knuckles of rock sticking out along the rim,
where no trees grew, nothing taller in it than the shadows of the
penstemon which the moon cast upon the rocks. Whenever the wind
moved, there was a strong smell of sweet grass and yerba buena.
There would have been about thirty men of the Outliers gathered
when we came up the ridge from Deep Fern. We halted with the
women at a point where we could see, near to one end, a little fire of
crossed sticks low on the ground. The Outliers were at all times
sparing of fire and cautious in the use of it.
 The Council had been sitting some time, I think, upon other
matters, when we took up our station on the rising ground.
Trastevera went down, winding between the rocks toward the ruddy
point of fire. The moon was moving in a shallow arc not high above
the ranges, and some hurrying clouds scattered the light. We could
see little more than the stir of her going, the pale discs of faces or the
shining of an arm or shoulder in the clear space between the
shadows of the clouds.
She went on quietly, all talk falling off before her until she stood in
the small, lit circle between the leaders, who inquired formally of her
had she anything to say of importance on the business of the two
strangers.
“Only this,” she said, “that although I was greatly troubled before
they came, by a sense of danger impending, I am now free from it so
far as the House-Folk are concerned.”
“But do you,” questioned Prassade, “sense trouble still, apart from
these?” He motioned toward Herman and me, who had been brought
behind her almost to the circle of the flare.
“Trouble and shadow of change,” she said, and after a pause:
“Shall I speak?”
Without waiting for the click of encouragement that ran about the
Hollow, she began:
“You know all of you that I have, through no fault, the blood of the
Far-Folk, which has been for a long time the blood of traitors and
falsifiers. And yet never at any time have I played traitor to you nor
brought you uncertain word, except”—I thought her voice wavered
there—“in the matter of the hostage.”
If there had been any wavering it was not in the councillors, whose
attention seemed to stiffen to the point of expectation as she went on
steadily.
“When it was a question more than a year ago whether the Far-
Folk should send us their best man and cunningest as a hostage for
accomplished peace, you know that I was against it, though I had no
reason to give, beyond the unreasoning troubling of my spirit. Later
when Ravenutzi was brought into our borders, and I had met with
him, there was something which sang to him in my blood, and a
sense of bond replaced the presentiment. All of which I truly
admitted to you.”
So still her audience was, so shadowed by the drift of cloud, that
she seemed, as she stood with her face whitened by the moon, and
the low fire glinting the folds of her dress, to be explaining herself to
herself alone, and to admit the need of explanation.
“And because,” she said, “I could not be sure if it was a foreseeing,
or merely my traitor blood making kinship to him, you took the
matter to council and accepted the hostage. Are you sorry for it?”
At this, which had been so little anticipated, there went a murmur
around the hollow as of doubt not quite resolved. Several cried out
uncertain words which a ruffle of wind broke and scattered. Prassade
wagged his red beard, shouting:
“No! By the Friend!”
“Then,” she went on, more at ease, I thought, “as it was with
Ravenutzi, so with these. I saw trouble, and now I do not see it;
trouble that comes of keeping them, or trouble of letting them go.
That I cannot determine for you. So I say now, if you do not regret
what you have done by Ravenutzi, do the same with these, accept
and hold them, waiting for a sign.”
She left off, and the moon came out of the cloud to discover how
they stood toward it, and went in again discovering nothing.
Then a man who had already pricked himself upon my attention,
stood up to argue the matter. He was short and exceedingly stout of
build. Above the thick bands of leather that protected his lower
limbs, he wore no dress but a cougar skin bound about the thick
columnar body and held in place by a cord passing over the shoulder.
He was armed with a crotched stick that had an oblong pointed stone
bound in the crotch by thongs, the handle of which was so long that,
as he stood with his hands, which were wide and burned but shapely,
resting upon it, the head of the weapon lay upon the ground. What
was most singular in his appearance, as he stood blocked solidly
against the half-lit sky, was his hair. It was pale yellow, crisp and
curling, and rayed out erectly from his head as though it were the
emanation of some natural force or property of the man, curiously
and independently alive above the square and somewhat
meaningless regularity of his countenance.
 “Why,” inquired he, “were these House-Folk brought here to Deep
Fern? Why not made to drink forgetfulness when first taken?”
“Evarra had forgotten the Cup,” Persilope explained; “she thought
it could be gathered at Broken Tree, but she had forgotten how much
further the season is advanced in that neighborhood.”
“But now,” said Evarra, “I have prepared it, and there is nothing
more to do.” She came forward, and I observed that she held a
wooden bowl against her breast from which steam arose, and an
aromatic smell.
The moon had risen early on the track of the sun. The shallow lap
of hills in which we stood gave directly westward to the belated glow
that diffused through the moon shadows an amber bloom, in which,
though the faces of the Outliers shone indistinctly, every motion and
purpose was discernible. I could see then that Evarra’s purpose was
to give Herman and me to drink of some herb which should cause us
to forget all that had happened to us since we had crossed their
borders at Broken Tree, and so send us home again. It met with so
much approval that I spoke hurriedly to forestall it.
“No, no!” I cried. “We have done no harm to you that you should
do so great a harm to us. If you must send us away, why, send us, and
we will give you our word, and that is the best thing we have to give,
that no one shall know of what has happened these four days. But do
not take away the recollection from us.” I spoke so earnestly and
meant so much what I said, taking Herman’s hand so as to include
him in the vehemence of my request, though I do not think he had
any particular feeling at the time, that I made some way with them.
“Nothing is farther from our thoughts,” I said, seeing Evarra
hesitate, “than to bring harm upon you. Not for the world would we
betray your ways nor your homes nor your treasure——”
I do not know why I should have mentioned treasure, except that
seeing old Noche’s flowing head outlined against the pale luminosity
of the sky that instant, brought it to my mind. The word popped out
on my tongue as suddenly as it had popped in. Instantly there was a
sharp crackling of exclamations and a stir as of people rushing
together when a brand has snapped out of the fire, followed by a
portentous stillness. Into this bay of sound the red-pointed beard of
Prassade projected itself.
 “Who,” he cried, “has been telling of treasure in the hearing of
House-Folk?”
“No one, no one,” I protested, anxious not to provoke blame; “it is
only that I overheard the children——”
“It was I,” admitted Noche regretfully, “old fool that I am. I was
telling the children, and I did not think she understood so much.”
“Fool!” said Prassade; “and twice fool for being an old one!”
But Persilope corrected him.
“At the time of the Wardship it is permitted to tell the children of
the King’s Desire and the keeping of it.”
“But not in the presence of House-Folk,” Prassade insisted, “nor by
one who thinks there is no harm in a jewel if only it shines well and
has a story to it.”
There was more to this which the wind broke and carried away,
arms lifted and heads cast up within the shadow, turbulence and
murmurs of denial. I heard Trastevera say, half to herself:
“Trouble come indeed, when one Outlier calls another a fool in
open council.”
“It is nothing,” whispered Evarra at my shoulder, “all this talk.
Though you had the King’s Desire in your hand, yet you would stay if
Persilope thought she wished it.”
Then the yellow head of Mancha crinkled in the circle of the fire,
his face under it grotesquely blocked with light, like some ancient
mask, crying:
“Signs—do we wait for Signs? Here is a Sign: first the woman
comes, and then the man seeking her. Now, if they are not returned
speedily to their own place who may not come looking for the two of
them? And if, being kept, they escape by chance and go back talking
of treasure——”
“But a Sign!” cried Persilope, interrupting him. “Outliers, here is a
Sign. These House-Folk have found us in a place where none of their
kind so much as mark our trails. Within a day after being in our
camp they have heard of the King’s Desire, and talked openly of it.
This is a Sign that they are more favored by the Friends of the Soul of
Man than any of their kind. Is it not a Sign?”
 We could see men rising to their feet here and there, and some
cried out: “A Sign! A Sign!” And then other broken phrases, torn and
trumpeted by the wind. Persilope took the bowl from Evarra, holding
it out over the fire with a motion to extinguish the dying flame.
“One has seen strangers coming, and strange things have come;
shall we not wait upon her word?” he cried. I could make nothing of
the confused murmur which ringed the hollow. Persilope must have
read acquiescence in it, for he partially emptied the contents of the
bowl upon the fire and then passed it to Mancha, Ward of the Outer
Borders, to see what he would do. Mancha, smiling, handed the cup
to Trastevera as a sign of unbroken confidence; she, as I guessed, so
accepting it. That was the last I saw of her before Evarra hurried me
away, holding high the bowl, slowly pouring the ceremonial water,
silvered by the moon.
 IV
THE MEET AT LEAPING WATER

W ithin five days, during which it rained and cleared, a fine long
growing rain that left the world new washed and shining, the
Meet of the Outliers was moved to Leaping Water.
This was the amphitheater of the terraced basin lying next above
Deep Fern, and took its name from the long leap of the creek that
came flashing down arch by arch from the high, treeless ridges. Five
leaps it took from Moon-Crest to the Basin, where it poured
guttering, in so steep a channel that the spray of it made a veil that
shook and billowed with the force of its descending waters. It trailed
out on the wind that drove continually, even on the stillest days,
between the high wings of the mountain, and took the light as it
traveled from east to west and played it through all its seven colored
changes. It was like a great pulse in the valley, the throb and tremble
of it, flushing and paling. The Basin was clear meadow land, well-
flowered, close set by the creek, but opening well under the
redwoods, with here some sunny space of shrubs, and there
stretching up into the middle region of white firs dozing on the
steeps above the water.
It was here we began to learn about the Love-Left Ward which was
the occasion of their coming together.
The very first I heard of it was from Evarra’s slim lad, Lianth, who,
when he was sent to keep me company, would lie on the fern,
propping his chin upon his hand, and sing to me in his reedy
unsexed voice, of a maiden who had left loving for the sake of a great
service to her tribe. Then plucking up the brown moss by the roots,
examining it carefully, he would ask me if I thought it was really right
for a girl to do that sort of thing.
 “What sort?”
“Give up loving and all her friends, boys she’s always—liked, you
know, and keep a Ward, like Zirriloë.”
“Did she do that?”
“Well, they chose her to be the Ward this year, and her father let
her. I don’t think he ought!”
“Why not?”
Lianth was not very clear on this point, except as it involved the
masculine conception of beauty as the sign of a real inward
preciousness. Zirriloë had a way of walking, like a wind in a
blooming meadow, she had a cheek as soft, as richly colored, as the
satin lining of unripened fir cones which he broke open to show me.
Therefore Prassade shouldn’t have let her forswear all loving for ten
years.
“She can’t even look at a boy,” said Lianth; “only at old men, Noche
and Waddyn and Ravenutzi, and if there was—anybody—had
thought of marrying her, he’d have to give up thinking about it for
ten years. And anyway, what is the good of giving a girl secrets to
keep if you have to watch her night and day to see that she keeps
them?”
There was a great deal more to this which Herman learned from
the men and the girl’s father. Prassade, whose eldest child she was,
felt himself raised to immeasurable dignity by the choice of Zirriloë,
who was in fact all that Lianth reported her, and more. To his pride it
was a mere detail that during the ten years of her Wardship she was
to live apart from all toward whom her heart moved her, kept by old,
seasoned men, who never left her except with others older and less
loverly than themselves. These six months past she had been with
her watchers in a lonely place, learning by trial what it meant to have
left all love to become the Ward of mysteries.
It was there Trastevera had been when I first saw her, to examine
the girl and discover if her mind was still steadfast.
So she found it, and so reported it to Prassade, and all things being
satisfactory, the feast of the Love-Left Ward was to take place on the
fifth day from this. When her term was done the Ward took the Cup,
and so forgetting all she had heard, returned to the normal use of
women.
 “But,” I said to Lianth, once when we were gathering elderberries
by the creek, “what is it all about, this secret which Zirriloë must
keep, and is not trusted in the keeping?”
“Ah!” he exclaimed impatiently, kicking at the mossy stones in the
water-bed. “Ask Noche—he is one of the keepers.”
I should have taken that advice at once, but Noche was away at the
Ledge, or River Ward, or wherever the girl was, and Evarra was
much too busy to talk. Practically all the Outliers were expected at
Leaping Water, and there was a great deal to do. As to how many
there were of them, and what places they came from, I could never
form any idea, since outside of Council Hollow they never came
together in the open. At the fight at River Ward there were forty
picked men, slingsmen and hammerers, but counting women and
children there must have been quite four times that number at
Leaping Water. They ran together like quail in the wood, and at a
word melted like quail into its spacious silences.
There was that subtle essence of rejuvenation in the air that comes
after rain. Buds of the incense shrub were swelling and odorous. All
the forest was alive and astir with the sense of invisible friendly
presences and low-toned happy talk that seemed forever at the point,
under cover of a ruffling wind or screening rush of water, of breaking
into laughter.
We came often upon lovers walking in the high arched aisles,
children scuttling pink and unabashed in the dappled water, or at
noons, men and women half sunk in the fern deep in gossip or
dozing. Such times as these we began to hear hints by which we
tracked a historic reality behind what I had already accepted heartily,
and Herman with grudging, the existence of the King’s Desire.
They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown
redwood litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them.
Then one would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless
tune, all of dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by
the weight of jewels, and another would answer with a song about a
lovely maid playing in sea caves full of hollow light.
By this we knew the thoughts of all of them ran on the story which
held the songs together like a thread. We discovered at last that it
was the history of the place from which they had come to Outland,
bringing the Treasure with them, pursued by the Far-Folk. Or
perhaps it was they who were the pursuers, but the Treasure had
been the point of their contention, and it had cost the Outliers so
much that they had come to abhor even the possession of it. So
having buried it, they made their honor the keeping of the secret.
Because the first disturbance over it that reft them from their
country had been brought about by the treachery of a woman, they
put a woman to the keeping, half in irony, I think, for then they had
set a watch upon the woman.
It was about this time that Herman waked to an interest on the
occasion that nothing else had been able to arouse in him. He
thought that a community which had arrived at the pitch of
understanding that the best thing to be done with wealth was to get
rid of it, would repay study. I remember his wondering if the Outliers
had had any more trouble with their Treasure, or what they imagined
as such, for he never would credit its reality, than we had
experienced with the Coal Oil Trust. I paid very little attention to
him, for all my mind was occupied in watching Ravenutzi.
From the first I had noticed that whenever there was one of those
old tales, or any talk of the King’s Desire, something would spring up
in his face, as slight as the flick of an eyelid or the ripple of muscles at
the corner of his mouth, but something at which caution snapped
wide-awake in me. I recall how once we lay all together at the bottom
of the wood in the clear obscure of twilight, in a circular, grassless
space where the water went by with a trickling, absent sound. One of
the young men began to sing, and Ravenutzi had stopped him with
some remark to the effect that the Outliers could sing it so if it
pleased them, but the story as it was sung was not true.
“Come,” said the youth, “I have always wanted to know how the
Far-Folk told that part of the tale so as not to be ashamed of it.”
Prassade sprang up protesting that there should be no
communication between them and the Hostage on a forbidden
matter. Some debate followed among the elders as to that. I could see
the smith sitting in his accustomed attitude, knees doubled, hands
clasped about them, his chin resting on his knees. The eyes were
black in the twilight under the faun’s profile and the streaked,
springy hair, yet always as if they had a separate furtive intelligence
of their own. It occurred to me suddenly, that in this very debate
precipitated by Ravenutzi, the Outliers were talking about the
Treasure, and that he did not care in what fashion so long as they
talked. Instinctively as I felt this, turning in my mind like a weed in
the surf, I looked toward Trastevera as one turns in a dim room
toward the light, holding out my mind to her as to one of better sight.
I caught the eyes of Ravenutzi, the iris, opaque and velvety,
disappearing under the widening pupil of his fixed gaze. I felt the
rushing suggestion back away from the shore of my mind and leave it
bare. There was something I had meant to speak to Trastevera about,
and I had forgotten what it was.
It was brought back to me the next day, which was the one before
the move to Leaping Water. We were sitting in Evarra’s hut, Herman
and I, with Noche, for the wind and cloud of the Council had
contrived to blow up a rain that drummed aloud on the bent fern but
scarcely reached us through the thick tent of boughs. Above us we
could hear the wind where it went hunting like a great cat, but down
at the bottom of the pit of redwoods it could scarcely lift the flap of
the door.
And without some such stir or movement of life within, one might
have passed a trail’s breadth from the house of Evarra and not
suspected it, so skillfully was it contrived within one of those sapling
circles that spring up around the decayed base of ancient redwoods,
like close-set, fluted columns round a ruined altar. Every family had
two or three such rooms, not connected, not close together, but
chosen with that wild instinct for unobtrusiveness with which the
Outliers cloaked the business of living. From the middle of one of
these, smoke could go up through the deep well of green and mingle
undetected with the blue haze of the forest. Deep within, tents of skin
could be drawn against the rain which beat upon them with a
slumberous sound and dripped all down the shouldering colonnade.
The tent was half drawn this morning, and no drops reached us,
but seldom, light spatterings from high, wind-shaken boughs. Evarra
was abroad looking after her family, and Noche had come over with
Herman to sit housed with me. The Outliers had, from such
indifferent observation as they had made, got the notion that House-
Folk were of great fragility as regards weather. They were
exceedingly careful of us, though I had seen Noche laugh as he shook
the wet from his body, and take the great gusts of wind as a man
might the moods of his mistress. He sat opposite us now on a heap of
fern, busy at his sling-plaiting, with the placidity of a spinning
Hercules, and in a frame to be entertaining. It occurred to me it
might be an excellent time to beguile him into talk of the Treasure,
much to Herman’s annoyance, for he was of the opinion that my
having been a week among the Outliers and no harm having come of
it, was no sign it wouldn’t come eventually.
“Don’t meddle with their tribal mysteries,” he protested; “if it
hadn’t been for their confounded Treasure we would have been on
the trail for home by now.”
“But consider,” I explained to Herman for Noche’s sake; “if we
drink Forgetfulness at the last, what does it matter how much we
know before? And besides, he is suffering to tell me. Go on, Noche.”
Once you had old Noche started, his talk ran on like the involute
patterns he loved to trace upon the sand, looping to let in some
shining circumstance or set off some jewel of an incident. It was a
wonderful treasure by his account: lamps thick with garnets, crusted
with amethysts, and the cup of the Four Quarters which a dead king
held between his knees.
Outside we could hear the creaking of the boughs as the wind
pounced and wallowed, stalking an invisible prey. Within the hut we
saw in the old man’s story, the summer island from which the tale
began, far southward, rising from the kissing seas. All at once he left
off, breathing quick, his nostrils lifted a little, quivering, his head
turning from side to side, like a questing dog’s. We had heard
nothing but the trickle of rain down the corrugated trunks, but
Noche, turning his attention toward the doorway, twitched his great
eyebrows once, and presently broke into smiling.
“Trastevera,” he said; and then a very curious thing happened.
Some patches of the red and brown that had caught my attention
from time to time at the burl of the redwood opposite stirred and
resolved into Ravenutzi. How long he had been there I had no
notion. Though I was well acquainted with that wild faculty of the
Outliers to make themselves seem, by very stillness, part of the rock
and wood, I was startled by it quite as much on this occasion as on
the first time of my meeting him. It was not as though Ravenutzi
made himself known to us by a movement, but drew himself out of
obscurity by the force of his own thinking. The fact of his being there
seemed to shoulder out all question as to why he was there in the
first place. He was looking, with that same curious fixity that held me
when I caught him dyeing his hair at the spring, not at me, but at
Trastevera approaching on the trail. She came up the trail in that
lifting mood with which the well body meets weather stress, as if her
spirit were a sail run up the mast to catch the wind. She came lightly,
dressed as the women mostly were, in an under tunic of soft spun
stuff, of wood green or brown color, but her outer garment was all of
the breasts of water birds, close-fitted, defining the figure. She
looked fairly back at Ravenutzi as she came, smiling from below her
quiet eyes. He walked on past her so casually that only I could say
that he had not merely been passing as she passed. But I was sure in
my own mind he had been sitting close by Evarra’s hut for a long
time.
She gave us Good Friending as she came in, but it was not until
Noche, in response to a sign from her, had taken Herman out by the
brook trail, that she spoke to me directly.
“If you made a promise to me in regard to your being here and
what you shall see among us, would he, your friend, be bound by it?”
“Well, in most particulars; at any rate, he would give it
consideration.”
“Does he love you?”
“No,” I said. I was sure of that much.
“How do you know?”
“By the best token in the world. He has told me so.”
“Ah!” She looked at me attentively a moment, as if by that means
she might discover the reason.
“Then in that case he will probably do as you say. If he loved you,”
she smiled, “he would expect you to do as he said.”
She loosened her feather coat, shaking out the wet, and took from
Evarra’s wall an oblong piece of cloth, brown and yellow barred like
the streakings of sunlight on the bark of pines, and disposed it so
that, with the folds lying close and across the slender body and the
two loose ends falling over the shoulders, she looked like some
brooding moth that bides the rain under a sheltering tree.
 “You are so much more like us,” said she, “than I would have
expected; so much more understanding. Have you Far-Seeing?”
“How Far-Seeing?”
“There are some among us,” she said, considering, “who can lie in
their beds at night and hear the deer crossing at Lower Fern; some
who can stand in their doors and see the face of a man moving on the
cliffs at Leaping Water. But I am one who can see trouble coming
before the bearer of it has reached Broken Tree. Have you such?”
“I have heard of them.”
“Do you know then if they see better or worse, for loving?”
I could not tell her that, though I wished to, since she made such a
point of it. I had to content myself with asking her how it was with
herself.
“Very much better,” she laughed, and colored; “or worse.” She
frowned, sighing. “I will tell you how that is.”
“When I was just grown,” said Trastevera, “I was chosen to be—to
fulfill a certain duty which falls every ten years to some young
woman of the tribe. It was a duty which kept my heart occupied so
that there was no time for loving or being loved. I was much apart
and alone, and it was then that my Gift came to me, the gift of Far-
Seeing. It served the tribe on many occasions, particularly on one
when we were at war with the Far-Folk. I saw them breaking through
at River Ward, and again I saw them when they tried to get at us
from the direction of the sea——But it was not of that I meant to tell
you. After I was released from my duty I had planned because,
because——” She seemed to have the greatest difficulty getting past
this point, which for so direct a personality as hers was unusual. I
gathered that the matter was involved in the tribal mysteries which
Herman had warned me to avoid, so I could not help her much with
questioning.
“Because of a certain distinction which they paid me, I had
planned,” she went on at last, “to have no love and no interest but
theirs. It came as a shock to me when Persilope was made Warden of
the Council, to find that it was agreed on every side that I should
marry him.”
“Didn’t you love him then?” I was curious to know.
 “I scarcely knew him, but I knew what he was, and if it was
thought best for me to love him, I wished, of course, to do what was
best. And Persilope wished it also.”
“You could do that? Love, I mean where you were told to love.”
Somehow the idea filled me with a strange trepidation.
“If the man was love worthy, why not?” She was surprised in her
turn. “So long as my heart was not yet given, it was mine to give
where the Outliers would be best served by it. Do you mean to say,”
she asked, sensing my incredulity, “that it is not so with the House-
Folk? Do you not also serve the tribe most?”
“With our lives and our goods,” I admitted.
“But not with your loving? But if you love only to yourselves, is not
the common good often in peril from it?”
“Often and often,” I agreed. Suddenly it began to seem a childish
and ineffectual thing that we should be in the most important issues
of life so at the mercy of place and incident, obscuring coquetries and
tricks of dress.
“Sometimes it is so with us,” she agreed, “but not with people like
myself and Persilope. When it was brought to our notice how all the
Outliers would be benefited by our uniting his practical sense with
my far-seeing, we held our hearts out like a torch and lighted each
from each.” They could do that it seemed, these Outliers, apt full
natures, they could rise in the full chord of being and love without
other inducement than the acknowledgment of worth. That was why
the Outliers took no notice of what I was secretly ashamed of having
noticed, that she was years older than her husband.
Leaving the habits of the House-Folk, Trastevera went on with her
narrative.
“We have a custom when we are married,” she said, “of choosing
where it shall be. We set forth, each from his own home, all our
friends being apprised of what we are about to do and wishing us
well. Then we come to the place, each by his own trail, meeting there
under no eyes. When a month is done we go home to our friends,
who make a great to-do for us. There is a hill I know, looking
seaward, a full day from here. There are pines at the top and oaks
about the foot, but the whole of it is treeless, grassy, with flowers that
sleep by day among the grasses. It is neither windy nor quiet, but
small waves of air run this way and that along the grass, and make a
changing pattern. Here I chose to meet Persilope. All day I went
down by Deer Leap and River Ward to meet my man, and he came
up by Toyon and the hiving rocks to meet me. All day I felt him
come, and the earth felt him: news of him came up through the
grasses and touched my finger-tips.” She flushed a little, and finished
simply: “When we came back,” she said, “I had reason to believe I
had lost the gift of Far-Seeing. It was while we were away that the
Far-Folk had opened the matter of the hostage, and the Council
waited for Persilope to come back from his wedding to decide what
was best to be done. The people were for the most part glad to put an
end to quarreling.”
This was the first time that I realized that there was another sort of
woodlanders beside the Outliers. Up till this time, when I had heard
mention of Far-Folk, I thought it perhaps another sort of name for
us, House Livers, as they called us indifferently, or Diggers, or They
of the Ploughed Lands, as people will speak of a wild species, very
common but of too little interest to be named or known.
“So soon as I had heard of the Far-Folk’s plan to send us their
smith as a perpetual hostage,” she went on, “I was chilled with
prescience of disaster, and said so freely. But when Ravenutzi came
to council, and I had looked him through, I was warm again. You
heard how I said last night that I could not tell if it was the blood of
the Far-Folk playing traitor in me, or if there was, in fact, no shadow
coming. So I was obliged to say to the Council, and they on their own
motion, without any help from me, accepted him. No one has blamed
me”—she mused a little, with her chin upon her hand—“but ever
since I have been afraid. There might really have been some
intimation of coming evil which my happiness, going from me to
everything I looked upon, dispelled as a bubbling spring breaks up a
shadow.”
She rose and walked from me a little space, returned, and stood
before me so intent upon getting some answer more than my words,
that I thought it best to let no words trouble her. Presently she went
on:
“Since then I have had no serious forecasting that concerned the
Outliers at large. But some days before Prassade first found you, I
had a vision of Broken Tree and a bird rising from it crying trouble.
There was shadow lying on my world, and dread of loss and change.
But this is the strangest thing of all. When I had seen you I saw more
than that. Between you and Ravenutzi there was some bond and
understanding.”
“No, no!” I protested; “on his part, yes, some intention toward me,
some power to draw me unaware to meet some end of his. And
yet....”
“And yet you like him?”
I admitted it. Though I had no special confidence in his purpose, I
felt my soul invite his use.
“And that,” said Trastevera, “is why I have kept you here and
advised that you be told anything it is lawful for an Outlier to know.
Ordinarily when we find House-Folk among us we give them the Cup
and let them go. But since you are to drink forgetfulness at last,
before that happens you may be of use to me.”
“But how?”
Though I had more curiosity than concern, I could see doubt
pulsing in her like the light breathing of a moth. She resolved at last.
“Even if you betray me, there is still the Cup,” she said. “You have
already been of use to me, for as I came into camp last night I felt the
shadow; it was not on you when I looked, but when Ravenutzi looked
at you I saw it fall, and it fell from him.”
She considered me attentively to see what I would make of this,
but not willing to say until I had considered it myself, I spoke of the
Cup; beginning to take it seriously for the first time.
“Of what,” said I, “will it make me forgetful?”
“Everything at first, but by degrees the past will clear. Only around
all that happens here, and around the circumstance of your drinking
it, there will be the blank of perfect sleep.”
“But why are you so sure in sparing me, that I shall be able to serve
you?”
“How could you help it?” She looked at me in quick surprise. “You
are not like your friend is who says this is good or not good, and that
is the end of it. You are one in whom the vision clouds and colors. By
the color of your mind when it falls under Ravenutzi’s I shall learn
perhaps whether to trust my old distrust of him or my present
friendliness.
“Oh!” she cried, perceiving so readily at that instant the half
conviction, half credulity, of my mind toward her that she was
embarrassed by it. “Is it so among House-Folk that they must always
explain and account for themselves? If I said to an Outlier that he
could help me he would not have questioned it.”
“But what am I to do?”
“Hold the will to help me. Be friends with the smith if he is
friendly, and say nothing of this to any one but me. When your time
comes to take the Cup I will see that it is made light for you.”
It did not sound very difficult, and perhaps I did not take it very
seriously; at any rate I gave the promise. Trastevera unwinding
herself from the striped cloth like a moth coming out of a chrysalis,
resumed her feather coat and left me with that suddenness I had
learned to expect of the Outliers, like a bird flitting or a weasel
slipping in the chaparral.
On the very first occasion of our being alone together after that I
demanded of Evarra what Trastevera had meant by saying that she
was of the blood of Ravenutzi, and that the blood was traitorous. I
could ask that safely, because I had learned that, except in the one
important matter of the Treasure, the Outliers had no skill in
concealments and no knowledge whatever of indirection. It was as if
somewhere in their history they had so sickened of the stuff of
treachery that their teeth were set on edge at the mere attitudes of it,
tricks, pretensions and evasions.
So I knew that if I opened a forbidden matter, Evarra would tell
me so flatly, and that would be the end of it. And if it was permissible
to speak at all, she would do me no such discourtesy as not to speak
freely.
It was a very old affair, she said, but one well known among the
Outliers. In one of their quarrels with the Far-Folk one of their own
women was taken and kept. Afterward she had been returned to her
home by purchase, and had had a child shortly after, begotten upon
her unwillingly by one of the Far-Folk. From that child Trastevera
was descended. The blood of the Far-Folk, said Evarra, was a foul
strain, but they had mixed it with the best of theirs, and there was no
more treason left in it than there was soiling of last season’s rains in
the spring that watered Deep Fern. None of the Outliers had even
remembered it until Ravenutzi came. As for these Far-Folk, they
were to the Outliers all that cat was to dog, hill-dwellers, seeking
treeless spaces, holes in the rock and huts of brush; wiry folk,
mocking and untruthful. But they were such inveterate craftsmen
that a man of them could sooner smudge himself at a forge making a
knife to trade you for a haunch of venison, than go a-hunting for his
meat himself. It was so most of the iron implements I had noticed
had been circulated among the Outliers. For their part they preferred
casting themselves joyously forth on the day to come back well
furnished by their own hands.
But a man of the Far-Folk would sit all day with his nose to a bit of
hammered metal, graving on it strange patterns of beasts and whorls
and lacing circles. When it was done, said Evarra, there was no great
pleasure in it, for it would not glitter as a bit of shell, nor brown nor
brighten as a string of berries, nor be cast every hour in a new
pattern like a chaplet of flowers, but remained set forever, as the Far-
Folk in their unkempt ways.
They were piliferous too, and lived in such relation as weasels
might to the people of the Ploughed Lands; by which term she always
spoke of the few farmers whose homesteads I could occasionally see
from Outland. The Far-Folk would go down by night across the
borders of the Outliers to the farmyards for their scraps of metal, and
ate fruit from the orchards. It was to purchase free passage for such
expeditions through disputed territory that they had given hostage to
their foes at Deep Fern; free leave to go and come from Deer Leap to
the River Ward, and between Toyon and Broken Head. Up to this
time the compact had been scrupulously kept, though it was evident
from Evarra’s manner of admitting it, she begrudged any good
opinion I might have of the Far-Folk on that account.
“And what harm have you had from Ravenutzi?”
Ah, that was as might be, if you counted the failure of Trastevera’s
visions and his making a fool of old Noche with his smith’s tricks.
The old man had thought of little this year past but forge work and
designs—and prating to the children of the King’s Desire. “If it had
been my child listening to him,” finished Evarra, “I should have
smacked him.”
 All of which I told to Herman at the first opportunity. And also
that I should never be happy one moment until I had found out what
fact, if any, lay behind the story of the King’s Desire.
“What’s the good of finding out,” said Herman gloomily, “if we
have to take their everlasting dope on top of it?”
“And within three days of the most sophisticated society on earth,”
I reminded him. “They are having the golf tournament at Mira Monte
this week. Could you believe it?”
“Oh, I don’t believe a word of it,” he insisted. “This is just one of
the tales you’ve made up, and you’ve hypnotized me into going
through with it, but I don’t believe it at all.”
 V
THE LOVE-LEFT WARD

I was sitting under a toyon tree watching Evarra brew forgetfulness

in a polished porphyry bowl, when Herman came by. It was the
morning of the Meet. The Cup was wanted for her who was the
Ward, and Evarra took a great deal of pains with the brew, heating
the bowl slowly and, when the dry leaves began to smoke and give off
an odor of young fir, dropping water gently and setting it to steep in
the sun. I had hoped to discover what plant it might be, but there was
little to be guessed except that it had a blue flower taken in the bud,
and smelled like a wood path in the spring. Evarra sat and stirred
under the toyon and answered my questions or not as she was
inclined.
“Do you know any sort of an herb, Evarra, that will turn gray hair
black again?”
“That I do; and black hair gray if you wish it.” But I had not caught
the significance of her statement, when Herman came along,
bursting full of news. He was looking almost handsome that
morning, for he had put on the dress of the Outliers for the first time,
and though he had managed it so as to cover more of his skin than
was their fashion, it became him very well. Some satisfying quality
streamed from him, according with the day. As if he had laid off
something besides the dress which had come between him and the
effect I had wished him to have on me.
“Come up the trail with me; I have some news for you,” he began.
“May she?”
This last was to Evarra. With all the basin of Deep Fern and
Leaping Water full of their own folk we had been allowed to move
freely about among them, but there was still a form of keeping us
under guard.
“Go up,” said Evarra, probably glad to get rid of me, “as far as
Fallen Tree, where you can see the Leap between that and the
clearing. I will join you presently. You can see the procession best
from there, when it first comes out of the wood.”
The dew was not yet gone up from the shadows nor the virgin
morning warmed a whit toward noon; the creek sang at the curve, I
felt the axles of the earth sing as it swung eastward. I spread out my
arms in the trail and touched the tips of the growing things, and felt
the tide of abundant life rise through my fingers. Herman strode in
the trail ahead and called over his shoulder:
“What are you laughing at back there, Mona?”
“News,” I answered, for I had remembered suddenly something
Trastevera had said to me.
“What news?”
“How should I know, except that it is good news? The
meadowsweet told it to me. What’s yours?”
“That Treasure you’re so keen about; they’ve really got it. I’ve
talked with men who’ve seen it.”
“Noche?”
“He hasn’t come back yet, but Waddyn, one of the keepers—there
were four of them—dug it up ten years ago and reburied it.”
“But why?”
“That’s my news. On account of Trastevera. She was the Ward ten
years ago, and they were afraid to give her their wretched drug lest
they should destroy her gift of Far-Seeing, as they call it. So they took
counsel and decided to change the hiding-place. Prassade said it
wasn’t an altogether popular movement. Some of the Wards haven’t
taken kindly to the Cup when their turn came, and they feared the
precedent. But anyway they did it. They made a cordon round the
place where it was hid, three days’ journeys wide, and the four old
men went in and dug up the Treasure and buried it again.”
“All those jewels and beaten gold?”
“Whatever it is they’ve got, colored pebbles most likely. It wouldn’t
have been so bad, Prassade says, changing the place of the Treasure;
that has happened several times in their history. But while they had
it up they had a look at it, and Noche’s head has been turned ever
since.”
“I should think it might. It’s all true, then?”
“Folk tales, likely; all tribes have them.” Though his face was
turned from me on the trail, I could feel Herman’s professional
manner coming on again. “It is extraordinary, though, how their
social organization is so nearly like to what you would expect of a
highly civilized people thrown suddenly back on the primal
environment. Take their notions of property now——”
What he was going to say must have been very interesting, but just
at this point we came to Fallen Tree, and saw the irised banner of the
Leap floating before its resounding crash of waters. A little spit of
grassy land ran here from the clearing into the dense growth, and the
trail entered by it. Beyond it, pale late lilies censed the shadows of
the redwoods, and below in the meadow there was nothing fairer
than the bleached, wind-blown hair of the children, as they ran and
shouted through the scrub. Evarra came hurrying with the Cup
against her breast. Prassade and Persilope took up a station of some
prominence on the point opposite us, with Mancha behind them,
leaning on his long weapon. Presently the flutes began.
The sound of them stole upon us softly from far within the
redwoods, keyed a little under the bell tones of the creek, and rising
through it to the pitch at which the water note seems forever at the
point of breaking into speech. As the procession skirted the meadow,
the music emerged in a tune fetching and human. Now you heard the
swing of blossoms by runnels in the sod, the beat of spray on the bent
leaves by the water borders; then the melody curling and uncurling
like the ringlets on a girl’s neck. With the music some sort of pageant
passed, boys and girls wreathed and dancing, forming as they wound
in the wood glooms, breaking and dissolving where the trail led
through the bright, sunned space of the meadow. We could hear
from the Outliers ranged about the clearing, light applause of
laughter like the patter that follows the wind in the quaking asp.
The pageant circled the open space around which rippled the
curved blade of the creek, and came to halt behind Persilope and the
Council. Then a drum-beat arose and rolled steadily, the four keepers
came out of the wood; Noche and Waddyn and two others I did not
know or observe, except that they were not young and carried the
occasion solemnly. The keepers took up their station on either side of
the meadow, and the two foremost, saluting, passed on a little
beyond the chief. Into the hollow square thus formed for her, came
the maiden Ward.
First as she stood there, one realized in her figure the springing
pose of immaturity, in her gaze the wraptness and fixity of the
devotee. Altogether she was of so exquisite a finish and delicacy that
one would wish to have plucked her like a flower. She was dressed in
a smooth, seamless bodice of tawny skin, baring the throat and
rounded upper arm; below that a skirt of thin green was shaped to
her young curves by the vagrant wind. Her hair, which was all of
burnt gold, powdered with ashes of gold, was drawn loosely back and
confined close to her head, but fell free to her hips, blown forward,
defining her like the sheath of a flower. Her brows also were touched
with gold and the eyes under her brows were like agate at the bottom
of a brook.
She wore no jewels but a thread of scarlet berries that, in its
revealing femininity, in the way it took the curve of her slender
throat and ran into the little hollow between her breasts, so seemed
to me as if I had never seen a more endearing ornament. As she
appeared among us,—for though she had walked very quietly out of
the forest there was that appealing quality of her loveliness which
gave to her coming the swiftness of a vision,—as she appeared thus, a
ring of smiling ran sensibly about the hushed, observing circle.
She moved in the exultation of her shining mood, unconscious of
the way her feet went or what eyes were upon her, to the sound of the
shallow drums and the delicate high flutes. As the music dropped she
stopped before Persilope, who stood forward a little with some
formal words of ritual or salutation. I missed the exact words, all my
attention taken up with what had happened to Mancha. He had been
standing just behind the chief, and in the brief interval while Zirriloë
had come ten steps or so out of the shadow, he had passed, as though
her beauty had been some swift, vivifying shock, from being a grave
beholder to an active participant of the occasion. Deep red surged up
in his face and left it pale again, his eyes, which were blue, burned
amber points and took her like a flame. He shook as though the
joints of his spirit were loosed, and took the full red under-lip in his
teeth to keep back the tide of strength that came on him as he looked
at her. His breath came purringly. I saw the soul of the man lithe and
rippling in him, the glint of his eyes, the mass and thickness of his
body incredibly lifted and lightened by the consciousness of the
Mate. He did not know what had happened to him, but he laughed to
himself his joy in her, as she moved wrapped in her high errand
down the still summer glade, and across the meadow.
“Herman! Herman! Do you see?” I whispered.
He was sitting on the fallen tree next to me, and as I moved my
hand toward him in that vague pang following quick on the shock of
inexpressible beauty, I felt his fingers cold. His lips were open and I
saw his tongue move to wet them, like a man unconsciously athirst.
Beyond the clearing, thick purplish trunks of the redwood upbore
the masses of foliage like a cloud. The space between the first twenty
feet or so of their gigantic columns was choked with laurel and holly
and ceanothus, pierced by long tunnels that the deer had made.
Down one of these the two foremost of the keepers plunged and were
lost behind the mask of loose, wild vines that festooned the front of
the wood, lifting and falling in the wind that by mid-morning began
to set seaward from the high ridges.
But the girl, some ten steps behind them, still in her half-seeing
mood, missed the moment of the out-streaming of the vines, checked
and faltered. The wind caught her dress and wrapped her in it, the
drapery of vines swung out and caught her hair. Before the other
keepers could come up with her, the long arm of Ravenutzi reached
out from his point of vantage on a heavy, slanting trunk and gathered
up the offending vines, holding them high and guardedly until the
girl could pass. The detention was slight, but long enough for the
annoyance of it to have pierced her abstraction before he let the
curtain fall almost on the heads of the hurrying keepers, long enough
for her to have looked up at Ravenutzi and accord to him the first
conscious recognition of her solemn passage. Whatever flattery there
might have been in that, it could not draw so much as a backward
glance from him. With the swish of the long vines flung back upon
the wall of boughs, he sprang forward from his perch, and as if that
action had been the signal, drew with him a ring of staring faces
toward the grassy spit by which the trail entered the meadow.
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