Two weeks had passed and he was returning from a long climb inland, when he stopped to rest in his descent to the sea.  The panorama of the shore was before him, from its uttermost limit to the lighthouse on the northern point.  The sun was still one hour high, it would take him about that time to reach home.  But from this coign of vantage he could see—­what he had not before observed—­that what he had always believed was a little cove on the northern shore was really the estuary of a small stream which rose near him and eventually descended into the ocean at that point.  He could also see that beside it was a long low erection of some kind, covered with thatched brush, which looked like a “barrow,” yet showed signs of habitation in the slight smoke that rose from it and drifted inland.  It was not far out of his way, and he resolved to return in that direction.  On his way down he once or twice heard the barking of an Indian dog, and knew that he must be in the vicinity of an encampment.  A camp-fire, with the ashes yet warm, proved that he was on the trail of one of the nomadic tribes, but the declining sun warned him to hasten home to his duty.  When he at last reached the estuary, he found that the building beside it was little else than a long hut, whose thatched and mud-plastered mound-like roof gave it the appearance of a cave.  Its single opening and entrance abutted on the water’s edge, and the smoke he had noticed rolled through this entrance from a smouldering fire within.  Pomfrey had little difficulty in recognizing the purpose of this strange structure from the accounts he had heard from “loggers” of the Indian customs.  The cave was a “sweat-house”—­a calorific chamber in which the Indians closely shut themselves, naked, with a “smudge” or smouldering fire of leaves, until, perspiring and half suffocated, they rushed from the entrance and threw themselves into the water before it.  The still smouldering fire told him that the house had been used that morning, and he made no doubt that the Indians were encamped near by.  He would have liked to pursue his researches further, but he found he had already trespassed upon his remaining time, and he turned somewhat abruptly away—­so abruptly, in fact, that a figure, which had evidently been cautiously following him at a distance, had not time to get away.  His heart leaped with astonishment.  It was the woman he had seen on the rock.

Although her native dress now only disclosed her head and hands, there was no doubt about her color, and it was distinctly white, save for the tanning of exposure and a slight red ochre marking on her low forehead.  And her hair, long and unkempt as it was, showed that he had not erred in his first impression of it.  It was a tawny flaxen, with fainter bleachings where the sun had touched it most.  Her eyes were of a clear Northern blue.  Her dress, which was quite distinctive in that it was neither the cast off finery of civilization nor the cheap “government”