and height and hollow unawares. Thus it
came to pass that although they were once or twice pretty near the cave
where the children were sleeping, they did not find it. Moreover, the
ground in places was very hard, so that, although they more than once
discovered faint tracks, they invariably lost them again in a few
minutes. They shouted lustily, too, as they went along, but to two such
sleepers as Olaf and Snorro in their exhausted condition, their wildest
shouts were but as the whisperings of a sick mosquito.

Gradually the searchers wandered farther and farther away from the spot,
until they were out of sight and hearing.

We say sight and hearing, because, though the children were capable of
neither at that time, there was in that wood an individual who was
particularly sharp in regard to both. This was a scout of a party of
natives who chanced to be travelling in that neighbourhood at the time.
The man--who had a reddish-brown body partially clad in a deer-skin,
glittering black eyes, and very stiff wiry black hair, besides
uncommonly strong and long white teeth, in excellent order--chanced to
have taken up his quarters for the night under a tree on the top of a
knoll. When, in the course of his slumbers, he became aware of the fact
that a body of men were going about the woods with flaring torches and
shouting like maniacs, he awoke, _not_ with a start, or any such
ridiculous exclamation as "Ho!" "Ha!" or "Hist!" but with the mild
operation of opening his saucer-like eyes until they were at their
widest. No evil resulting from this cautious course of action, he
ventured to raise his head an inch off the ground--which was his rather
extensive pillow--then another inch and another, until he found himself
resting on his elbow and craning his neck over a low bush. Being almost
black, and quite noiseless, he might have been mistaken for a
slowly-moving shadow.

Gradually he gained his knees, then his feet, and then, peering into
space, he observed Biarne and Krake, with several others, ascending the
knoll.

For the shadow to sink again to its knees, slope to its elbows, recline
on its face, and glide into the heart of a thick bush and disappear, did
not seem at all difficult or unnatural. At any rate that is what it
did, and there it remained observing all that passed.

"Ho! hallo! Olaf! Snorro! hi-i-i!" shouted Biarne on reaching the
summit of the knoll.

"Hooroo!" yelled Krake, in a tone that must h