But Pierre shook his head.

"There is nothing," he said, "nothing;" yet he knew that Sherburne was
looking upon the men of judgment of the Kimash Hills, the sleepers. He
looked round, half fearfully, for if here were those great children of
the ages, where was the keeper of the house, the Red Patrol?

Even as he thought, a figure in scarlet with a noble face and a high
pride of bearing stood before them, not far away. Sherburne clutched his
arm.

Then the Red Patrol, the Scarlet Hunter spoke: "Why have you sinned your
sins and broken your vows within our house of judgment? Know ye not that
in the new springtime of the world ye shall be outcast, because ye have
called the sleepers to judgment before their time? But I am the hunter of
the lost. Go you," he said to Sherburne, pointing, "where a sick man lies
in a hut in the Shikam Valley. In his soul find thine own again." Then to
Pierre: "For thee, thou shalt know the desert and the storm and the
lonely hills; thou shalt neither seek nor find. Go, and return no more."

The two men, Sherburne falteringly, stepped down and moved to the open
plain. They turned at the great entrance and looked back. Where they had
stood there rested on his long bow the Red Patrol. He raised it, and a
flaming arrow flew through the sky towards the south. They followed its
course, and when they looked back a little afterwards, the great
judgment-house was empty, and the whole north was silent as the sleepers.

At dawn they came to the hut in the Shikam Valley, and there they found a
trapper dying. He had sinned greatly, and he could not die without
someone to show him how, to tell him what to say to the angel of the