One evening as I roamed upon the cliff, and with vain longing scanned the sea, on a sudden I espied, moving among the tree trunks on my right hand, a patch of red. In great perturbation of spirit I sprang behind a tree. I had not seen clearly what the object was: it might be a man, it might be a beast. In the wildernesses about the middle of Hispaniola there were, I knew, herds of wild dogs and boars, a terror to human kind; and a fear beset me lest Tortuga also were the haunt of savage creatures, which might come upon me in the night. Meseemed I must at the least resolve my doubts, wherefore I went forward stealthily, bending among creeping plants, skipping from trunk to trunk, straining my eyes for another glimpse of that patch of red. For some little while I sought in vain, and I was in a sweat of apprehension lest I should stumble into danger; but after stalking for near half-an-hour, as I supposed, of a sudden I saw some moving thing among the trees within a hundred paces of me. Even as I watched, a quaint and marvellous figure came forth into a little open space—the form of a man, arrayed from doublet to shoes in garments of bright red. His head was bare; a rapier hung at his side; and as I looked he plucked the weapon by the hilts, and made sundry passes in the air, going from me slowly into the woodland. Never in my life had I beheld a man so oddly apparelled, and to find such an one here, on this lone island of Tortuga, set me athrill with admiration. I deemed that I should have no security of mind until I had learnt somewhat of this stranger, and whether there were others with him; wherefore with stealthy steps I followed him into the woodland, and there, after near losing him, I saw him enter a little hut set in the midst of a narrow laund. From behind a tree I watched the red man. He kindled a fire, and I looked for him to cook his supper; but instead, he laid himself down on a bed of dried grass, so that the smoke from the fire might be carried by the light wind across him, the which in a moment I guessed to be his device for warding off the insects; I had suffered many things from their appetite in the nights I had slept in the woods of Hispaniola. Seeing that the red man had composed himself to sleep, I returned quietly to my hut on the shore, and when I fell asleep dreamed that I beheld him defending at the rapier’s point young Antonio against the whip of the noble admiral Don Alfonso de Silva de Marabona. I rose with the sun and stole back to the woodland, in hope to see the man quit his sleeping-place and to gain some light upon his manner of life and his doings upon this lone island. But the hut was empty; its inhabitant was already astir. Not that day nor for several days after did I set eyes on him again; but one high noon I had a glimpse of him roaming along the cliff, and while I was following, a great way off, he suddenly vanished from my sight as ’twere into the earth.