We entered a wood of small hemlocks, and I felt rather than saw the ground slope in front of us.  About two hundred feet above the water the glen of a little stream shaped itself into a flat cup, which was invisible from below, and girdled on three sides by dark forest.  Here we walked more freely, till we came to the lip of the cup, and there, not twenty paces below me, I saw a wonderful sight.  The hollow was lit with the glow of a dozen fires, round which men clustered.  Some were busy boucanning meat for ship’s food, some were cooking supper, some sprawled in idleness, and smoked or diced.  The night had now grown very black around us, and we were well protected, for the men in the glow had their eyes dazed, and could not spy into the darkness.  We came very close above them, so that I could hear their talk.  The smell of roasting meat pricked my hunger, and I realized that the salt air had given me a noble thirst.  They were common seamen from the pirate vessels, and, as far as I could judge, they had no officer among them.  I remarked their fierce, dark faces, and the long knives with which they slashed and trimmed the flesh for their boucanning.

Shalah touched my hand, and I followed him into the wood.  We climbed again, and from the tinkle of the stream on my left I judged that we were ascending to a higher shelf in the glen.  The Indian moved very carefully, as noiseless as the flight of an owl, and I marvelled at the gift.  In after days I was to become something of a woodsman, and track as swiftly and silently as any man of my upbringing.  But I never mastered the Indian art by which the foot descending in the darkness on something that will crackle checks before the noise is made.  I could do it by day, when I could see what was on the ground, but in the dark the thing was beyond me.  It is an instinct like a wild thing’s, and possible only to those who have gone all their days light-shod in the forest.

Suddenly the slope and the trees ceased, and a new glare burst on our eyes.  This second shelf was smaller than the first, and as I blinked at the light I saw that it held about a score of men.  Torches made of pine boughs dipped in tar blazed at the four corners of the assembly, and in the middle on a boulder a man was sitting.  He was speaking loudly, and with passion, but I could not make him out.  Once more Shalah put his mouth to my ear, with a swift motion like a snake, and whispered, “The Master.”

We crawled flat on our bellies round the edge of the cup.  The trees had gone, and the only cover was the long grass and the low sumach bushes.  We moved a foot at a time, and once the Indian turned in his tracks and crawled to the left almost into the open.  My sense of smell, as sharp almost as a dog’s, told me that horses were picketed in the grass in front of us.  Our road took us within, hearing of the speaker, and though I dared not raise my head, I could hear the soft Highland voice of my friend.  He seemed now to be speaking humorously, for a laugh came from the hearers.