When everything they had rescued had been carried beyond the reach of the waves and placed in the lee of a rock out of the wind, the two boys skirted the beach in the hope that the meat, corn or clothes might have been cast up in some other spot. The beach, at the head of a small and shallow cove, was not long. When Hugh had gone as far over pebbles and boulders as he could, he scrambled up the rock point that bounded the cove on the north and followed it to the end, without seeing anything of the lost articles. As he reached the bare rock tip, the sun was just coming up among red and angry clouds across the water, flushing with crimson and orange the wildly heaving waves. The wind was a little east of north. No rain had fallen where the boys were camped, but Hugh felt sure from the clouds that a storm must have passed not many miles away. The little cove being open and unprotected to the northeast, the full force of the wind entered it and piled the waves upon the beach.
When Hugh returned to the camping place, he found that Blaise, who had gone in the other direction, had had no better luck. The strong under pull of the retreating waves had carried the lost articles out to deep water.
Going on with the journey in such a blow was out of the question. The boys made themselves as comfortable as possible behind a heap of boulders out of the wind.
“I wish we knew in which direction Ohrante is bound,” Hugh said, as he scraped the last morsel of his scanty portion of corn porridge from his bark dish, with the crude wooden spoon he had carved for himself.
“He went up the shore as we came down,” Blaise replied. “He is probably going down now. Somewhere he has met his enemies and has taken one prisoner at least.”
“I wish we might have travelled farther before camping,” Hugh returned.
Blaise shrugged in his French fashion. “He cannot go on in this weather, and we cannot either. Passing him last night was a great risk. I knew that all their eyes would be blinded by the fire glare, so they could not see into the shadows, else I should not have dared. All went well, yet we must still be cautious and make but small fires and little smoke.”
“No column of smoke can ascend high enough in this gale to be seen,” Hugh argued.
“But the smell will travel far, and the wind blows from us to them. Caution is never wasted, my brother.”
Forced to discontinue the journey for most of the day, the lads spent the time seeking food. They were far enough from Ohrante’s camp to have little fear that any of his party would hear their shots, yet they chose to hunt to the north rather than to the south. With some of the dry powder and the shot that had been saved, Blaise started out first, while Hugh spread the wet powder to dry on a flat rock exposed to the sun but sheltered from the wind. Then he cleaned and dried his gun and greased it with pork fat before leaving camp.