The Adventures of a Modest Man

The Dryad's skirts were short enough as it was, but she hastily picked them up. She had a right to. "Does it bite?" she whispered, looking carefully around in the grass. But all she could see was a strangely beautiful butterfly settled on a blue wild blossom which swayed gently in the wind on the edge of the jungle. So she dropped her skirts. She had a right to.

Now, within a few moments of the hour when Jones had first laid eyes on her, and she on Jones, he had confided to her his family history, his ambitions, his ethical convictions, and his theories concerning the four known forms of the exquisite Ajax butterfly of Florida. She had been young enough to listen without yawning – which places her age somewhere close to eighteen. Besides, she had remembered almost everything that Jones had said, which confirms a diagnosis of her disease. There could be no doubt about it; the Dryad was afflicted with extreme Youth, for she now recognized the butterfly from the eulogy of Jones, and her innocent heart began a steady tattoo upon her ribs as Jones, on tiptoe, crept nearer and nearer, net outstretched.

The moment was solemn; breathless, hatless, bare-armed, the Dryad advanced, skirts spread as though to shoo chickens.

"Don't," whispered Jones.

But the damage had been accomplished; Ajax jerked his pearl and ashen banded wings, shot with the fiery crimson bar, flashed into the air, and was gone like the last glimmer of a fading sun-spot.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" cried the Dryad, clasping her highly ornamental hands; "what on earth will you think of my stupidity?"

"Nothing," said Jones, resolutely, swallowing hard and gazing at the tangled jungle.

"It was too stupid," insisted the Dryad; and, as the silence of Jones assented, she added, "but it is not very nice of you to say so."

"Why, I didn't," cried Jones.

"You did," said the Dryad, tears of vexation in her blue eyes. "And to pay for your discourtesy you shall make me a silk net and I shall give up golf and spend my entire time in hunting for White Devils, to make amends."

The suggested penance appeared to attract Jones.

"Give up golf – which I am perfectly mad about," repeated the Dryad, "just because you were horrid when I tried to help you."

"That will be delightful," said Jones, naïvely. "We will hunt Ajax together – all day, every day – "

"Oh, I shall catch – something – the first time I try," observed the Dryad, airily. She teed up a practice ball, hit it a vicious whack, followed its flight with narrowing blue eyes, and, turning placidly upon Jones, smiled a dangerous smile.

"If I don't catch an Ajax before you do I'll forfeit anything you please," she said.

"I'll take it," said Jones.

"But," cried the Dryad, "what do you offer against it?"

"Whatever I ask from you," he said, deliberately.

"You are somewhat vague, Mr. Jones."

"I won't be when I win."

"Tell me what you want – if you win!"

"What? With this caddie hanging around and listening?" The Dryad, wide-eyed and flushed, regarded him in amazement.

Jones picked up a pinch of wet sand from the box, moulded it with great care into a tiny truncated cone, set it on the tee, set his ball on top of it, whipped the air persuasively with his driver once or twice, and, settling himself into the attitude popularly attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes, hit the ball for the longest, cleanest drive he had ever perpetrated.

"Dryad," he said, politely, "it is now up to you."

Of all the exquisite creatures that float through the winter sunshine of the semi-tropics this is the most exquisite and spirituelle. Long, slender, swallow-tailed wings, tinted with pearl and primrose, crossed with ashy stripes and double-barred with glowing crimson – this is the shy, forest-haunting creature that the Dryad sought to snare, and sought in vain.

Sometimes, standing on the long, white shell roads, where myriads of glittering dragon-flies sailed, far away a pale flash would catch the sun for an instant; and "Ready! Look out!" would cry the Dryad. Vanity! Swifter than a swallow the Ajax passed, a pearly blurr against the glare of the white road; swish! swish! the silken nets swung in vain.

"Oh, bother," sighed the Dryad.

Again, in the dim corridors of the forest, where tall palms clustered and green live oaks spread transparent shadows across palmetto thickets, far in some sunlit glade a tiny wing-flash would bring the Dryad's forest cry: "Quick! Oh, quick!" But the woodland ghost was gone.

"Oh, bother, bother!" sighed the Dryad. "There are flowers – the sparkleberry is in blossom – there is bloom on the China tree, but this phantom never stops! Can nothing stop it?"

Day after day, guarding the long, white road, the Dryad saw the phantom pass – always flying north; day after day in the dim forest, the hurrying, pale-winged, tireless creatures fled away, darting always along some fixed yet invisible aërial path. Nothing lured them, neither the perfumed clusters of the China-berry, nor the white forest flowers; nothing checked them, neither the woven curtain of creepers across the forest barrier, nor the jungle walled with palms.

To the net of the Dryad and of Jones had fallen half a thousand jewelled victims; the exquisite bronzed Berenice, the velvet and yellow Palamedes, the great orange-winged creatures brilliant as lighted lanterns. But in the gemmed symmetry of the casket the opalescent heart was missing; and the Dryad, uncomforted, haunted the woodlands, roaming in defiance of the turquoise-tinted lizards and the possible serpent whose mouth is lined with snow-white membranes – prowling in contempt of that coiled horror that lies waiting, S shaped, a mass of matted grey and velvet diamond pattern from which two lidless eyes glitter unwinking.

"How on earth did anybody ever catch an Ajax?" inquired the Dryad at the close of one fruitless, bootless day's pursuit.

"I suppose," said Jones, "that every year or so the Ajax alights." That was irony.

"On what?" insisted the Dryad.

"Oh, on – something," said Jones, vaguely. "Butterflies are, no doubt, like the human species; flowers tempt some butterflies, mud-puddles attract others. One or the other will attract our Ajax some day."

That night Jones, with book open upon his knees, sat in the lamplight of the great veranda and read tales of Ajax to the Dryad; how that, in the tropics, Ajax assumes four forms, masquerading as Floridensis in winter and as Telamonides in summer, and how he wears the exquisite livery of Marcellus, too, and even assumes, according to a gentleman named Walsh, a fourth form. Beautiful pictures of Ajax illumined the page where were also engraved the signs of Mars and of Venus. The Dryad looked at these; Jones looked at her; the rest of the hotel looked at them. Jones read on.

Sleepy-eyed the Dryad listened; outside in the burnished moonlight the whippoorwill's spirit call challenged the star-set silence; and far away in the blue night she heard the deep breathing of the sea. Presently the Dryad slept in her rocking-chair, curved wrist propping her head; Jones was chagrined. He need not have been, for the Dryad was dreaming of him.

There came a day late in April when, knee deep in palmetto scrub, the Dryad and Jones stood leaning upon their nets and scanning the wilderness for the swift-winged forest phantom they had sought so long. Ajax was on the wing; glimpse after glimpse they had of him, a pale shadow in the sun, a misty spot in the shadow, then nothing but miles of palmetto scrub and the pink stems of tall pines.

Suddenly an Ajax darted into the sunny glade where they stood, and a ragged, faded brother Ajax fluttered up from the ground and, Ajax-like, defied the living lightning.

Wing beating wing they closed in battle, whirling round and round one another above the palmetto thicket. The ragged and battered butterfly won, the other darted away with the speed of a panic-stricken jacksnipe, and his shabby opponent quietly settled down on a sun-warmed twig.

Then it was that inspiration seized the Dryad: "Mr. Jones, you trick wild ducks into gunshot range by setting painted wooden ducks afloat close to the shore where you lie hidden. Catch that ragged Ajax, place him upon a leaf, and who knows?"

Decoy a butterfly? Decoy the forest phantom drunk with the exhilaration of his own mad flight! It was the invention of a new sport.

Scarcely appearing to move at all, so cautious was his progress, Jones slowly drew near the basking and battle-tattered creature that had once been Ajax. There was a swift drop of the silken net, a flutter, and all was over. In the palm of Jones's hand, dead, lay the faded and torn insect with scarce a vestige of former beauty on the motionless wings.

Doubting, yet stirred to hope, he placed the dead butterfly on a palmetto frond, wings expanded to catch the sun; and then, standing within easy net-stroke, the excited Dryad and Jones strained their eyes to catch the first far glimpse of Ajax in the wilderness.

What was that distant flash of light? A dragon-fly sailing? There it is again! And there again! Nearer, nearer, following the same invisible aërial path.

"Quick!" whispered the Dryad. A magnificent Ajax flashed across the glade, turned an acute angle in mid-air, and in an instant hung hovering over the lifeless insect on the palm leaf.

Swish-h! A wild fluttering in the net, a soft cry of excitement from the Dryad, and there, dead, in the palm of the hand of Jones, lay the first perfect specimen, exquisite, flawless, beautiful beyond words.

Before the Dryad could place the lovely creature in safety another Ajax darted into the glade, sheered straight for the decoy, and the next instant was fluttering, a netted captive.

Then the excitement grew; again and again Ajax appeared in the vicinity; and the tension only increased as the forest phantom, unseeing or unheeding the decoy, darted on in a mad ecstasy of flight.

No hunter, crouched in the reeds, could find keener excitement watching near his decoys than the Dryad found that April day, motionless, almost breathless, scanning the forest depths for the misty-winged phantom of the tropic wilderness. One in six turned to the decoy; there were long, silent intervals of waiting and of strained expectancy; there were false alarms as a distant drifting dragon-fly glimmered in the sun; but one by one the swift-winged victims dashed at the decoy and were taken in their strength and pride and all their unsullied beauty. And when the sport of that April morning was over, and when Denis, the Ethiopian, turned the horses' heads homeward, Ajax Floridensis, Ajax Marcellus and Ajax Telamonides were no longer mysteries to the Dryad and to Jones.