"Here is fire, and here is meat," the buccaneer replied, laconically, in the same language the traveller had employed; "rest yourself, and eat."
"I thank you," he said.
He dismounted: in the movement he made to leave the saddle, his cloak flew open, and the buccaneers perceived that the man was dressed in a religious garb. This discovery surprised them, though they did not allow it to be seen.
On his side the stranger gave a start of terror, which was immediately suppressed, on perceiving that in his precipitation to seek a shelter for the night, he had come upon a boucan of French adventurers.
The latter, however, had made him a place by their side, and while he was hobbling his horse, and removing its bridle, so that it might graze on the tall close grass of the savannah, they had placed for him, on a palm leaf, a lump of meat sufficient to still the appetite of a man who had been fasting for four and twenty hours.
Somewhat reassured by the cordial manner of the adventurers, and, in his impossibility to do otherwise, bravely resolving to accept the awkward situation in which his awkwardness had placed him, the stranger sat down between his two hosts, and began to eat, while reflecting on the means of escaping from the difficult position in which he found himself.
The adventurers, who had almost completed their meal before his arrival, left off eating long before him; they gave their dogs the food they had been expecting with so much impatience, then lit their pipes, and began smoking, paying no further attention to their guest beyond handing him the things he required.
At length the stranger wiped his mouth, and, in order to prove to his hosts that he was quite as much at his ease as they, he produced a leaf of paper and tobacco, delicately rolled a cigarette, lit it, and smoked apparently as calmly as themselves.
"I thank you for your generous hospitality, señores," he said, presently, understanding that along silence might be interpreted to his disadvantage, "I had a great necessity to recruit my strength, for I have been fasting since the morning."
"That is very imprudent, señor," Lepoletais answered, "to embark thus without any biscuit, as we sailors say; the savannah is somewhat like the sea, you know when you start on it, but you never know when you will leave it again."