d.

None but the full-grown warriors used to venture to have speech with
him, and then only as he sat in the door of his lodge, with the men in
a half circle before him. They never came alone. Along all the
seaboard, the Indians talked of Secotan, the man most potent in spells
and charms and prophecies, who was said to talk with strange spirits
in his lodge by night and who could call up storms out of the sea at
will. This spot at the summit of the hill, where the medicine man sat
so often, sometimes muttering spells, sometimes staring straight
before him across the valley, was magic forbidden ground, where no one
but himself was known to come. Yet the young Nashola, only fifteen
years old, and far from being a warrior, had been told that he must
consult the medicine man and had been in too much haste to seek him in
his own lodge or to wait until he could persuade a comrade to go with
him.

Stretched along the river below them was the camp of Nashola's
brown-skinned people, where springs gave them fresh water and where
the eastern hills of the valley gave shelter from the winter storms
that blew in from the sea. Beyond those green hills were rocky slopes,
salt swamps, a stretch of yellow sand, and then the great Atlantic
rollers, tumbling in upon the beach. The Indians of Nashola's village
would go thither sometimes to dig for clams, to fish from the high
rocks, and even, on occasions, to swim in the breakers close to
shore. But they were land-abiding folk, they feared nothing in the
forest, and would launch their canoes in the most headlong rapids of
the inland rivers; yet there was dread and awe in their eyes when they
looked out upon the sea. Not one of them had ever ventured beyond the
island at the mouth of the harbor.

They were a shifting, wandering people, moving here and there with the
seasons, as the deer and moose moved their grazing grounds, but their
most settled abiding place was this little green valley where they
spent a part of every year. Sometimes word would come drifting in,
through other tribes, of strange, white-faced men who had landed on
their shores, but who always sailed away again, since this was still
the time when America was all the Indians' own. What they did not see
troubled them little and they went on, undisturbed, hunting and
fishing and paying their vows to the spirits and demons that they
thought to be masters of their little world.

The old, wrinkled squaw who was Nashola's gra