The Firing Line

"Yes, if you wish it."

Another silence. Then she shook her head, not looking at him.

"There is no use in going—now."

"Why?"

"Because—because I do not wish it." Her eyes fell lower; she drew a long, unsteady breath. "And because it is too late," she said. "You should have gone before I ever knew you—if I was to be spared my peace of mind."

Gray came galloping back through the woods, followed by his father and Eudo Stent. They were rather excited, having found signs of turkey along the mud of a distant branch; and, as they all gathered around a cold luncheon spread beside the wagon, a lively discussion began concerning the relative chances of "roosting" and "yelping."

Hamil talked as in a dream, scarcely conscious that he was speaking and laughing a great deal. A heavenly sort of intoxication possessed him; a paradise of divine unrealities seemed to surround him—Shiela, the clustering pines, the strange white sunlight, the depthless splendour of the unshadowed blue above.

He heard vaguely the voices of the others, Cardross, senior, rallying Gray on his shooting, Gray replying in kind, the soft Southern voices of the guides at their own repast by the picket line, the stir and whisk and crunch of horses nuzzling their feed.

Specks moved in the dome of heaven—buzzards. Below, through the woods, myriads of robins were flying about, migrants from the North.

Gray displayed his butterflies; nothing uncommon, except a black and green one seldom found north of Miami—but they all bent over the lovely fragile creatures, admiring the silver-spangled Dione butterflies, the great velvety black Turnus; and Shiela, with the point of a dry pine needle, traced for Hamil the grotesque dog's head on the fore wings of those lemon-tinted butterflies which haunt the Florida flat-woods.

"He'd never win at a bench-show," observed her father, lighting his pipe—an out-of-door luxury he clung to. "Shiela, you little minx, what makes you look so unusually pretty? Probably that wild-west rig of yours. Hamil, I hope you gave her a few points on grassing a bird. She's altogether too conceited. Do you know, once, while we were picking up singles, a razor-back boar charged us—or more probably the dogs, which were standing, poor devils. And upon my word I was so rattled that I did the worst thing possible—I tried to kick the dogs loose. Of course they went all to pieces, and I don't know how it might have fared with us if my little daughter had not calmly bowled over that boar at three paces from my shin-bones!"

"Dad exaggerates," observed the girl with heightened colour, then ventured a glance at Hamil which set his heart galloping; and her own responded to the tender pride and admiration in his eyes.

There was more discussion concerning "roosting" versus "yelping" with dire designs upon the huge wild turkey-cock whose tracks Gray had discovered in the mud along the branch where their camp was to be pitched.

Seven hens and youthful gobblers accompanied this patriarch according to Eudo Stent's calculations, and Bulow thought that the Seminole might know the location of the roost; probably deep in some uninviting swamp.

But there was plenty of time to decide what to do when they reached camp; and half an hour later they started, wagon and all, wheels bumping over the exposed tree roots which infinitely bored the well-behaved dogs, squatting forward, heads in a row, every nose twitching at the subtle forest odours that only a dog could detect.

Once they emitted short and quickly stifled yelps as a 'possum climbed leisurely into a small tree and turned to inspect the strange procession which was invading his wilderness. And Shiela and Hamil, riding behind the wagon, laughed like children.

Once they passed under a heronry—a rather odoriferous patch of dead cypress and pines, where the enormous nests bulged in the stark tree-tops; and once, as they rode out into a particularly park-like and velvety glade, five deer looked up, and then deliberately started to trot across.

"We need that venison!" exclaimed Gray, motioning for his gun which was in the wagon. Shiela spurred forward, launching her mount into a gallop; Hamil's horse followed on a dead run, he tugging madly at the buck-shot shell in his web belt; and away they tore to head the deer. In vain! for the agile herd bounded past far out of shell-range and went crashing on through the jungle of the branch; and Shiela reined in and turned her flushed face to Hamil with a laugh of sheer delight.

"Glorious sight, wasn't it?" said Hamil. "I'm rather glad they got clear of us."

"So am I. There was no chance, but I always try."

"So shall I," he said—"whether there is a chance or not."

She looked up quickly, reading his meaning. Then she bent over the gun that she was breaking, extracted the shells, looped them, and returned the weapon to its holster.

Behind them her father and brother jeered at them for their failure, Gray being particularly offensive in ascribing their fiasco to bad riding and buck-fever.

A little later Shiela's horse almost unseated her, leaping aside and into the jungle as an enormous black snake coiled close in front.

"Don't shoot!" she cried out to Hamil, mastering her horse and forcing him past the big, handsome, harmless reptile; "nobody shoots black snakes or buzzards here. Slip your gun back quickly or Gray will torment you."

However, Gray had seen, and kept up a running fire of sarcastic comment which made Hamil laugh and Shiela indignant.

And so they rode along through the rich afternoon sunshine, now under the clustered pines, now across glades where wild doves sprang up into clattering flight displaying the four white feathers, or pretty little ground doves ran fearlessly between the horses' legs.

Here and there a crimson cardinal, crest lifted, sat singing deliciously on some green bough; now and then a summer tanager dropped like a live coal into the deeper jungle. Great shiny blue, crestless jays flitted over the scrub; shy black and white and chestnut chewinks flirted into sight and out again among the heaps of dead brush; red-bellied woodpeckers, sticking to the tree trunks, turned their heads calmly; gray lizards, big, ugly red-headed lizards, swift slender lizards with blue tails raced across the dry leaves or up tree trunks, making even more fuss and clatter than the noisy cinnamon-tinted thrashers in the underbrush.

Every step into the unknown was a new happiness; there was no silence there for those who could hear, no solitude for those who could see. And he was riding into it with a young companion who saw and heard and loved and understood it all. Nothing escaped her; no frail air plant trailing from the high water oaks, no school of tiny bass in the shallows where their horses splashed through, no gopher burrow, no foot imprint of the little wild things which haunt the water's edge in forests.

Her eyes missed nothing; her dainty close-set ears heard all—the short, dry note of a chewink, the sweet, wholesome song of the cardinal, the thrilling cries of native jays and woodpeckers, the heavenly outpoured melody of the Florida wren, perched on some tiptop stem, throat swelling under the long, delicate, upturned bill.

Void of self-consciousness, sweetly candid in her wisdom, sharing her lore with him as naturally as she listened to his, small wonder that to him the wilderness was paradise, and she with her soft full voice, a native guide. For all around them lay an enchanted world as young as they—the world is never older than the young!—and they "had eyes and they saw; ears had they and they heard"—but not the dead echoes of that warning voice, alas! calling through the ancient wilderness of fable.

CHAPTER XI

PATHFINDERS

Considerably impressed by her knowledge he was careful not to embarrass her by saying so too seriously.

"For a frivolous and fashionable girl who dances cotillions, drives four, plays polo, and reviews her serious adorers by regiments, you're rather perplexing," he said. "Of course you don't suppose that I really believe all you say about these beasts and birds and butterflies."

"What has disturbed your credulity?" she laughed.

"Well, that rabbit which crossed ahead, for one thing. You promptly called it a marsh rabbit!"

"Lepus palustris" she nodded, delighted.

"By all means," he retorted, pretending offensive scepticism, "but why a marsh rabbit?"

"Because, monsieur, its tail was brown, not white. Didn't you notice that?"

"Oh, it's all very well for you to talk that way, but I've another grievance. All these holes in the sand you call gopher burrows sometimes, sometimes salamander holes. And I saw a thing like a rat run into one of them and a thing like a turtle run into another and I think I've got you now—"

Her delightful laughter made the forest silence musical.

"You poor boy! No wonder your faith is strained. The Crackers call the gopher a salamander, and they also call the land turtle a gopher. Their burrows are alike and usually in the same neighbourhood."

"Well, what I want to know is where you had time to learn all this?" he persisted.

"From my tame Seminole, if you please."

"Your Seminole!"

"Yes, indeed, my dear, barelegged, be-turbaned Seminole, Little Tiger. I am now twenty, Mr. Hamil; for ten years every winter he has been with us on our expeditions. A week before we start Eudo Stent goes to the north-west edge of the Everglades, and makes smoke talk until he gets a brief answer somewhere on the horizon. And always, when we arrive in camp, a Seminole fire is burning under a kettle and before it sits my Little Tiger wearing a new turban and blinking through the smoke haze like a tree-lynx lost in thought."

"Do you mean that this aboriginal admirer of yours has already come out of the Everglades to meet you at your camp?"

"Surely he is there, waiting at this moment," she said. "I'd as soon doubt the stars in their courses as the Seminole, Coacochee. And you will see very soon, now, because we are within a mile of camp."

"Within a mile!" he scoffed. "How do you know? For the last two hours these woods and glades have all looked precisely alike to me. There's no trail, no blaze, no hills, no valleys, no change in vegetation, not the slightest sign that I can discover to warrant any conclusion concerning our whereabouts!"