"Your magic hath prevailed, brother," Shalah said. "In an hour's time
they will have crossed the Shenandoah, and at nightfall they will camp
on the farther mountains."
That sight gave me my first assurance of success. At any rate, I had
fulfilled my trust, and if I died in the hills Virginia would yet bless
her deliverer.
And yet my strongest feeling was a wild regret. These folk were making
for the untravelled lands of the sunset. You would have said I had got
my bellyful of adventure, and should now have sought only a quiet life.
But in that moment of bodily weakness and mental confusion I was shaken
with a longing to follow them, to find what lay beyond the farthest
cloud-topped mountain, to cross the wide rivers, and haply to come to
the infinite and mystic Ocean of the West.
"Would to God I were with them!" I sighed.
"Will you come, brother?" Shalah whispered, a strange light in his
eyes. "If we twain joined the venture, I think we should not be the
last in it. Shalah would make you a king. What is your life in the
muddy Tidewater but a thing of little rivalries and petty wrangles and
moping over paper? The hearth will soon grow cold, and the bright eyes
of the fairest woman will dull with age, and the years will find you
heavy and slow, with a coward's shrinking from death.
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