Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/41

Rh tree and talk for a long hour with the medicine man. His companions of his own age looked askance at such a friendship and his grandmother begged and scolded, but without avail.

Almost always, as he sat with his back against the tree, or lay full length in the long grass that was beginning to be dry and yellow with the coming autumn, the boy would fix his eyes upon the hills opposite through which there showed a gleam of sea. Like the picture of some forbidden thing was that glint of blue, framed by the green slopes and the sky above. He could see the whitecaps, the dancing glimmer of the sun, and the gray sea gulls that whirled and hovered and dipped before his longing gaze. He would lift his head to sniff the salt breeze that swept through the cleft in the hills, and to listen for that far-off thunder that could sometimes be heard as the great waves broke on the beach. At last, one day when he had sat so long with his friend that dusk was falling and the stars were coming out, he broke through the silence with a sudden question:

"Secotan, what lies beyond that sea?"

The medicine man shook his head without speaking.

"My grandmother says 'Nothing,'" pursued Nashola, "but I know that cannot be. Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that you may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and I am only a boy?"