“No matter,” he said to her excuses, and bending a troubled look on me, the doubt in him spoke out openly.
“It was of this, I think, _she_ spoke to me.”
At that slight emphasis the dark man who had the smith’s tools on him, looked at me with so sharp and surprising an interest that it distracted me from noticing who it was behind me asked with some eagerness:
“That there was one walking toward us on the trail, bearing trouble. On the morning of our leaving, she waked me early to say it. I am thinking this is the one. If you have forgotten the cup, Evarra, it is an omen.”
The interest of all the wood folk reawakened. They began to regard me with so much distrust that I was relieved when the chief made a sign to Noche to take me a little to one side. Thus they talk more freely, looking at me from time to time, sometimes seeming to blame the woman, and sometimes to praise her.
Noche was that same old man who had brought me from the neighborhood of Broken Tree, whose mild blue eyes, set rather shallowly in a broad face, continued to reassure me.
He sat off a considerate distance, and busied himself with plaiting of leather thongs. All his features were rugged, the mouth wide, the nose broad and open at the nostrils, but blunted all as if by some yielding humor in him which fitted oddly with the knotting of his muscles. Now and then he turned toward me with chuckling, slow laughter which served in place of comforting speech.
Whatever conclusion the woodlanders came to about me, it was not to take immediate effect. They talked or lay quietly in the fern as deer lie. They slept much, but always with some on guard, dropping off with even breathing peace, and waking without start or stretching, as if wakefulness were but a wind that stirred them by times, and sleep the cessation of the stir.
Toward evening they rose and cooked a meal, of which I had my share—deer meat, wild honey in the honey-comb, and some strange bread. Two or three others came in from hunting; they were dressed much the same as the red man who had found me, and carried slings in their belts or slung upon their shoulders. The west was red and the pines black against it. There rose a light ruffle of wind and sighed through the wood. With it passed through the camp an audible breath of expectation. One of the women stood up with water in a bowl of bark, holding it high above her head in the manner of one celebrating a ritual, crooning some words to which the others made a breathy, soft response. She turned the water out upon the fire, the ashes of which Noche deftly covered, then, extending the bowl toward the young leader, she smiled, saying: