hes to bake, and it being, evidently, a feast out of
the ordinary, a merry-making to which a third guest might be bidden,
suddenly Wildenai left the cavern again to return this time with a tiny
gray fox perched familiarly upon her shoulder.

"'Tis Onatoa, senor Englishman," she announced, gently stroking the
bushy tail of the little creature as it lay about her neck.

But from his vantage point above his rival, Onatoa merely sniffed
disdainfully with his sharp black nose. He looked far from friendly.

The princess laughed softly.

"He does not know you yet," she defended her pet. "He will soon learn to
love you, too."

"I will catch fish with thee next time thou goest," declared young
Harold later as they ate together. "There's no reason I can see why I
should stay mewed up forever in this cave. I fear not Indians! No, not
even Torquam, thy father, himself."

For an instant Wildenai seemed alarmed. Then she laughed.

"You are afraid of nothing. I knew it!" she exclaimed with pride. "Nor
would there be much danger. We will go to the other side of the island
where the waves run high and the cliffs are tall and black. There will
I show you the nests of the great eagles, and the antelope leaping
among the rocks. And,--who can tell?" she laughed again with child-like
pleasure, "perhaps we shall find a white otter!"

And, true to her word, he heard at dawn next day outside the cavern
the whistle of a blackbird, a signal early contrived between them. She
deemed it best, she explained, to start thus early that the darkness
might conceal them until they had passed well beyond the outskirts of
the village. But this danger overcome, they spent the whole day rambling
fearlessly among the hills,--a long, idle, happy day. Up many a dim
trail winding back into the canyons the princess led him. Through golden
thickets of wild mustard they passed, coming, when he least expected it,
upon glimpses of the summer sea framed between the branches of knarled
old oak trees.

"They are low and crooked, and they spread themselves over the ground as
do our English oaks," the young nobleman informed her.

As Wildenai had promised they discovered, poised high among the crags
of the wild southern shore, the great eagles of which she had told him,
measuring easily, from wing-tip to wing-tip, fully a dozen feet. The
white otter, rarest and most valuable of all the game hunted by her
people, eluded them, but many a small gray fox slipped away