night he sat and played a game of solitaire to see if they would ever
reach the place called Lonely Valley. Before the cards were dealt, he
made a sign upon his breast and forehead. Three times he played, and
three times he counted victory; and before three suns had come and gone,
they climbed a hill that perched over Lonely Valley. And of what they
saw and their hearts felt we know.

And when they turned their faces eastward they were as men who go to meet
a final and a conquering enemy; but they had kept their honour with the
man upon whose grave-tree Shon McGann had carved beneath his name these
words:

"A Brother of Aaron."

Upon a lonely trail they wandered, the spirits of lost travellers
hungering in their wake--spirits that mumbled in cedar thickets, and
whimpered down the flumes of snow. And Pierre, who knew that evil things
are exorcised by mighty conjuring, sang loudly, from a throat made thin
by forced fasting, a song with which his mother sought to drive away the
devils of dreams that flaunted on his pillow when a child: it was the
song of the Scarlet Hunter. And the charm sufficed; for suddenly of a
cheerless morning they came upon a trapper's hut in the wilderness, where
their sufferings ceased, and the sight of Shon's eyes came back. When
strength returned also, they journeyed to an Indian village, where a
priest laboured. Him they besought; and when spring came they set forth
to Lonely Valley again that the woman and the smothered dead--if it might
chance so--should be put away into peaceful graves. But thither coming
they only saw a grey and churlish river; and the poppet-head of the mine
of St. Gabriel, and she who had knelt thereon, were vanished into
solitudes, where only God's cohorts have the rights of burial. . . .