ed and thumped drearily,
drowning the bellowing of the dying steers. Once the deckhand stirred
and pointed.

"Lilies, Cap'n--pourin' from all the swamps, and dead ahead there
now!"

Scowling, Tedge held to the starboard. Yes, there they were--a phalanx
of flowers in the dusk. He broke into wild curses at them, his boat,
the staggering cattle.

"I'll drive to the open gulf to get rid of 'em! Outside, to sea! Yeh!
Stranger, yeh'll see salt water, and lilies drownin' in it! I'll show
yeh 'em dead and dried on the sands like dead men's dried bones!
Yeh'll see yer pretty flowers a-dyin'!"

The lone cowman ignored the sneer. "You better get the animals to feed
and water. Another mornin' of heat and crowdin'--"

"Let 'em rot! Yer pretty flowers done it--pretty flowers--spit o'
hell! I knowed 'em--I fought 'em--I'll fight 'em to the death of 'em!"

His little red-rimmed eyes hardly veiled his contempt for Milt Rogers.
A cowman, sailing this dusky purple bay to see a girl! A girl who sang
in the lily drift--a-sailing on this dirty, reeking bumboat, with
cattle dying jammed in the pens! Suddenly Tedge realized a vast
malevolent pleasure--he couldn't hope to gain from his perishing
cargo; and he began to gloat at the agony spread below his wheelhouse
window, and the cattleman's futile pity for them.

"They'll rot on Point Au Fer! We'll heave the stink of them, dead and
alive, to the sharks of Au Fer Pass! Drownin' cows in dyin' lilies--"

And the small craft of his brain suddenly awakened coolly above his
heat. Why, yes! Why hadn't he thought of it? He swung the stubby nose
of the _Marie_ more easterly in the hot, windless dusk. After a while
the black deckhand looked questioningly up at the master.

"We're takin' round," Tedge grunted, "outside Au Fer!"

The black stretched on the cattle-pen frame. Tedge was a master-hand
among the reefs and shoals, even if the flappaddle _Marie_ had no
business outside. But the sea was nothing but a star-set velvet ribbon
on which she crawled like a dirty insect. And no man questioned
Tedge's will.

Only, an hour later, the engineman came up and forward to stare into
the faster-flowing water. Even now he pointed to a hyacinth clump.

"Yeh!" the master growled. "I'll show yeh, Rogers! Worlds o' flowers!
Out o' the swamps and the tide'll send 'em back again on the reefs.
I'll show yeh 'em--dead, dried white like men's bones." Then he began
to whisper huskily to his engineer: "It's t