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They had made their homeward journey much more rapidly than they
had made the one on which they had been outward bound. It had
of course taken them some time to tramp back to the frontier, but
there had been no reason for stopping anywhere after they had
once reached the railroads. They had been tired sometimes, but
they had slept heavily on the wooden seats of the railway
carriages. Their one desire was to get home. No. 7 Philibert
Place rose before them in its noisy dinginess as the one
desirable spot on earth. To Marco it held his father. And it
was Loristan alone that The Rat saw when he thought of it.
Loristan as he would look when he saw him come into the room with
Marco, and stand up and salute, and say: ``I have brought him
back, sir. He has carried out every single order you gave
him--every single one. So have I.'' So he had. He had been
sent as his companion and attendant, and he had been faithful in
every thought. If Marco would have allowed him, he would have
waited upon him like a servant, and have been proud of the
service. But Marco would never let him forget that they were
only two boys and that one was of no more importance than the
other. He had secretly even felt this attitude to be a sort of
grievance. It would have been more like a game if one of them
had been the mere servitor of the other, and if that other had
blustered a little, and issued commands, and demanded sacrifices.
If the faithful vassal could have been wounded or cast into a
dungeon for his young commander's sake, the adventure would have
been more complete. But though their journey had been full of
wonders and rich with beauties, though the memory of it hung in
The Rat's mind like a background of tapestry embroidered in all
the hues of the earth with all the splendors of it, there had
been no dungeons and no wounds. After the adventure in Munich
their unimportant boyishness had not even been observed by such
perils as might have threatened them. As The Rat had said, they
had ``blown like grains of dust'' through Europe and had been as
nothing. And this was what Loristan had planned, this was what
his grave thought had wrought out. If they had been men, they
would not have been so safe.
From the time they had left the old priest on the hillside to
begin their journey back to the frontier, they both had been
given to long silences as they tramped side by side or lay on the
moss in the forests. Now that their work was done, a sort of
reaction had set in. There were no more plans to be made and no
more uncertainties to contemplate. They were on their way back
to No. 7 Philibert Place--Marco to his father, The Rat to the man
he worshipped. Each of them was thinking of many things. Marco
was full of longing to see his father's face and hear his voice
again. He wanted to feel the pressure of his hand on his
shoulder--to be sure that he was real and not a dream. This last
was because during this homeward journey everything that had
happened often seemed to be a dream. It had all been so
wonderful--the climber standing looking down at them the morning
they awakened on the Gaisburg; the mountaineer shoemaker
measuring his foot in the small shop; the old, old woman and her
noble lord; the Prince with his face turned upward as he stood on
the balcony looking at the moon; the old priest kneeling and
weeping for joy; the great cavern with the yellow light upon the
crowd of passionate faces; the curtain which fell apart and
showed the still eyes and the black hair with the halo about it!
Now that they were left behind, they all seemed like things he
had dreamed. But he had not dreamed them; he was going back to
tell his father about them. And how GOOD it would be to feel his
hand on his shoulder!
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