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:
“The word is with you, Persilope.”
He took the vessel from her, scattering its few remaining drops westward.
“To the sea!” he said; “down to the sea!”
“To the sea!” cried the Outliers, and laughed and girt themselves. Suddenly I found myself caught up into a kind of litter or swing made of broad bands of skin, in a position of great uneasiness to myself, between the shoulders of two men. The whole body of woodlanders set off rapidly, but in their former noiseless fashion, going seaward.
The moon was up and the tide far out when we issued upon the promontory called Cypress Point. There was little surf, and the glimmer of the tide ran like silvered serpents all along the rocks. With a shout the Outliers stripped and cut the molten water with their shining bodies; laughed and plunged and rose again, laughing and blowing the spray as long as the moon lasted. They were at it again with the earliest light, and I should have known they were gathering sea food without what one of the women told me, of a great occasion going forward at their home which lay far from here, and a great feast of all the tribe. When the tide allowed, they gathered fish and abalones, which the women carried to some secret place among the pines to cure and dry.
When the tide was up the Outliers lay by in the dark rooms of cypress, bedded on the thick, resistant boughs, or stretched along the ancient trunks so wried and bent to purposes of concealment. Often in the heat, when there was cessation of the low whispering tones and light easy laughter, I would rise up suddenly seeming to myself quite alone only to discover by the stir of the wind on hair or garment the watchers lying close, untroubled and observant. While they worked I lay bound lightly under the wind-depressed cypresses where no light reached, but strange checkered gleams of it like phosphorescent eyes.
By night I could hear the Outliers shouting strongly in the surf, and saw by day the Chinese fishing-boats from Pescadera crawl along the rocks, and the smoke of coasting steamers trailing a shadow like a dark snake on the sea’s surface, polished by the heat. The men worked with good-will and laughter, always with watchers out. If one moment they were hauling at the nets, at a mere squeak of warning there would not be to the unpracticed eye so much as the glint of the sun on bare skin. Once a great red car came careering around the point, all the occupants absorbed in Bridge, just when the sea was at its best, a sapphire sparkle moving under an enchanted mist and the land luminous with reflected light.