dent of the day I remember. I took in a reef or two, and adjusted
the sheets, for this was a game I knew and loved. The Indian watched me
closely, and made a sign to me to take the helm. He had guessed that I
knew more than himself about the handling of a boat in wind, and since
we were in an open sea, where his guidance was not needed, he preferred
to trust the thing to me. I liked the trait in him, for I take it to be
a mark of a wise man that he knows what he can do, and is not ashamed
to admit what he cannot.

That evening we had a cold bed; but the storm blew out in the night,
and the next day the sun was as hot as summer, and the wind a point to
the east. Shalah once again was steersman, for we were inside some very
ugly reefs, which I took to be the beginning of the Carolina keys. On
shore forests straggled down to the sea, so that sometimes they almost
had their feet in the surf; but now and then would come an open, grassy
space running far inland. These were, the great savannahs where herds
of wild cattle and deer roamed, and where the Free Companions came to
fill their larders. It was a wilder land than the Tidewater, for only
once did we see a human dwelling. Far remote on the savannahs I could
pick out twirls of smoke rising into the blue weather, the signs of
Indian hunting fires. Shalah began now to look for landmarks, and to
take bearings of a sort. Among the maze of creeks and shallow bays
which opened on the land side it needed an Indian to pick out a track.

The sun had all but set when, with a grunt of satisfaction, he swung
round the tiller and headed shorewards. Before me in the twilight I saw
only a wooded bluff which, as we approached, divided itself into two.
Presently a channel appeared, a narrow thing about as broad as a
cable's length, into which the wind carried us. Here it was very dark,
the high sides with their gloomy trees showing at the top a thin line
of reddening sky. Shalah hugged the starboard shore, and as the screen
of the forest caught the wind it weakened and weakened till it died
away, and we moved only with the ingoing tide. I had never been in so
eery a place. It was full of the sharp smell of pine trees, and as I
sniffed the air I caught the savour of wood smoke. Men were somewhere
ahead of us in the gloom.

Shalah ran the sloop into a little creek so overgrown with vines that
we had to lie flat on the thwarts to enter. Then, putting his mouth to
my ear, he spoke for the fi