However, the baron, while he had no doubt of his son's valour,
grievously doubted his discretion, and added to the party Ralph,
his chief forester, strictly charging Etienne in any difficulty to
be guided by his advice--directions which the young heir received
with a toss of the head, which spoke volumes for his submission.

They entered the forest--a gallant array, each party numbering
about twenty, and there were nearly twenty of such bands; but when
they divided and again subdivided, and each took their different
routes, they appeared lost in the vastness of the forest, and in a
very few minutes every band was so isolated that they heard no
sounds indicating that any save themselves were in the wood.

We will leave all other parties to their fate, and confine our
attention to that commanded by Etienne, which, indeed, was destined
to surpass all the others in the results accomplished, and in their
influence on the future destinies of all the personages in our
history.

They proceeded fully five miles from home before their real task
began. Perhaps the reader will wonder how they could know their own
destined region in so pathless a wilderness, but it was part of the
training they had received as hunters to find their way in the
lonely woods; and there were signs innumerable which told them
where they were, and in what direction they were going. Etienne
alone, could guide his men while day lasted, as well as a pilot
could steer a ship in a well-known archipelago, and in Ralph he had
a tower of strength.

Every landmark was known--the course of every stream; each tree, by
the direction in which it threw its boughs and by the mosses at the
foot of its trunk, told the points of the compass.

Yet there were probably, in so large an extent of country, many
wild glens and deep fastnesses hitherto untraversed, and these had
to be discovered and explored.

Straight through the territory assigned to them marched our little
band; keen-nosed dogs went first, secured by leashes, that the game
they continually aroused might not lead them astray; men followed
who, like American Indians, looked for "trails" in every soft
surface of ground, and along the banks of each stream of sweet
water, where men might come to drink, but by noon they had
traversed the whole extent of their territory in a straight line,
and discovered nothing. Once, indeed, they thought they were on the
scent of man; but they had crossed the trail of a w