There was some animal or bird among these trees which kept making a strange noise, and this M. le Chevalier would now and then imitate exactly. Anne asked what it was, and was told that it was an owl. After a little it seemed to Anne that there were people too in the forest, strange shadowy forms in curious garments. He commented on this, and M. le Chevalier told him not to be frightened, that they were all friends, and would do him no harm, and that it was, in fact, they who made the sound like an owl which he had answered. And, almost as he said it, two men seemed to come up out of the ground, two men with great wide-brimmed hats and long loose hair. They each carried a gun. It was too dark to see their faces. M. de la Vireville spoke to one in a strange tongue, and then he said to Anne, "Let him carry you, little one, and don't be frightened." So the man took him up in his arms, and Anne, being tired, was glad of this, though he had to struggle against a certain amount of the alarm which he had promised to try never to feel again. M. le Chevalier, who was of course too big to be carried, however tired he might feel, took the arm of the other man, and they went on again. And then, just as Anne was thinking that he would ask to be put down--for, after all, the man who carried him smelt almost too disagreeably--they came to a little hut roofed with branches, and one of the men knocked, and made the noise of the owl, and the door opened and they all went in. In the hut was another man in strange dress, and here, by a couple of rushlights, Anne, when he was deposited on his feet, had his first full view of a Chouan. By his side there stood an oldish man, not very tall, with enormously powerful shoulders and rather a short neck. On the lank, grizzled hair that fell to these shoulders was a large wide-brimmed hat; he wore the strangest breeches that Anne had ever seen, made of some dirty white material, pleated and full like a woman's skirt; from these to his sabots his legs were clad in deerskin gaiters. But his coat engaged the little boy's attention almost more, for it was blue, very short, and appeared to have another underneath it, and the front was elaborately embroidered in whorls of yellow and red. Pinned on to it was a tiny soiled square of linen, roughly worked with the emblem of the Sacred Heart, and a rosary was looped through one of the button-holes. The man's little twinkling eyes, set deep in his head, looked, Anne decided, rather wicked, and he had never seen a face which seemed so much as if it never could be washed clean, so grey and leathery was the wrinkled skin. The Chouan carried a musket slung across his back, and a knife and two pistols in a leather belt.