“Don’t be alarmed. I come as a friend. May I sit by your fire?”
He spoke in good English, though with a decidedly foreign accent.
“You are welcome, since you come as a friend,” said Mark, “though I must add that you have taken us by surprise.”
“Well now, stranger,” said Hockins, putting his musical instrument in his pocket, “how are we to know that you are a friend—except by the cut o’ your jib, which, I admit, looks honest enough, and your actions, which, we can’t deny, are peaceable like?”
The seaman put this question with a half-perplexed, half-amused air. The stranger received it without the slightest change in his grave aspect.
“You have no other means of knowing,” he replied, “except by my ‘jib’ and my actions.”
“Dat’s a fact, anyhow,” murmured Ebony.
“Who are you, and where do you come from?” asked Mark.
“I am an outlaw, and I come from the forest.”
“That’s plain-speakin’, an’ no mistake,” said Hockins, with a laugh, “an’ deserves as plain a return. We can’t say exactly that we are outlaws, but we are out-an’-outers, an’ we’re going through the forest to—to—Anty-all-alive-O! or some such name—the capital, you know—”