In the silence between the muffled beat of hooves the Maccabee heard at his ears the quick lively throb of a busy pump.  With it went the firm rush of a subdued stream.  He was hearing his own heart-beat, his own life flowing through his veins.  Since nature in him had hurried him out of the synagogue after its own desire, he seemed to have become primitive, conscious of the human creature in him.  Now, though he rode through a bewitching air through an enchanted land, he did not ride in a dream.  All his being was alert and sagacious.  Though the confusion of footprints in the dust showed plainly where men had passed by thousands, he did not follow their lead.  Over the tangle of marks lay a slim paw-printed, confident, careless trail of a jackal, following the scent to a well.  The Maccabee was obedient to the instinct of the animal instead of the reason of man.  At the end of that trail, surer than Ariadne’s scarlet thread in the labyrinth, he knew that thirst had taken the girl in the dress of silver tissue.  So as he rode along this faultless highway that fared level and undeviating by arches, causeways and bridges across mountains, over black marshes and profound valleys, he kept his eyes on the jackal’s trail.

Long after moonrise they came to a spot in the road where the human marks passed on, by hundreds, by other hundreds deserted the road and clambered up the side of the hill.  Over this deviation the jackal had trotted.  The Maccabee, tall on his horse, raised his fine head and searched all the brooding shapes of the hills about.

The road at this point ran through a defile.  On either side the slopes crowded upon the pass.  Above them were bold summits with groves of cedars, and in one of these the Maccabee made out a thin curl of smoke dimly illuminated by a moon-drowned fire.  Up there in the covert of the trees the girl in the silver tissue was resting from her perilous and outlawed journey.

“We will eat here,” the Maccabee said abruptly to Julian.

“Eat!” Julian exclaimed.  “What?”

The Maccabee signed to the pack on Julian’s horse.  Julian dismounted, shaking his head.

“What a savage appetite this travel in the untaught wilds of Judea hath bred in you, my cousin!  You, whom once a crust of bread and a cup of wine would satisfy!”

But the Maccabee climbed out of the roadway and, finding a sheltered spot behind a boulder, kicked together some of the dead weeds and twigs and set fire to the heap with flint and steel.  Then he lost interest in the preparation of his comforts.  He turned to look up at the faint column of illumination in the little copse of cedars and presently, stealthily, went that way.

It was a poor encampment that he came upon.