ater, tasted
of it, and grumbled on: "It ain't hardly salt, the big rivers are
pourin' such a flood out o' the swamps. Worlds o' flowers comin' out
the passes--"

"Damn the flowers!" Tedge arose, shaking his fist at them. "Back out
o' 'em! Pull up the Au Fer side, and we'll break through 'em in the
bay!"

Against the ebb tide close along Au Fer reef, the oarsman toiled until
Crump, the lookout, grumbled again.

"The shoal's blocked wi' 'em! They're stranded on the ebb. Tedge,
yeh'll have to wait for more water to pass this bar inside 'em. Yeh
try to cross the pass, and the lilies 'll have us all to sea in this
crazy skiff when the wind lifts wi' the sun."

"I'm clean wore out," the black man muttered. "Yeh can wait fer day
and tide on the sand, boss."

"Well, drive her in, then!" raged the skipper. "The in-tide'll set
before daylight. We'll take it up the bay."

He rolled over the bow, knee-deep in the warm inlet water, and dragged
the skiff through the shoals. Crump jammed an oar in the sand; and
warping the headline to this, the three trudged on to the white dry
ridge. Tedge flung himself by the first stubby grass clump.

"Clean beat," he muttered. "By day we'll pass 'em. Damn 'em--and I'll
see 'em dyin' in the sun--lilies like dried, dead weeds on the
sand--that's what they'll be in a couple o' days--he said they was
pretty, that fello' back there--" Lying with his head on his arm, he
lifted a thumb to point over his shoulder. He couldn't see the distant
blotch of fire against the low stars--he didn't want to. He couldn't
mark the silent drift of the sea gardens in the pass, but he gloated
in the thought that they were riding to their death. The pitiless sun,
the salt tides drunk up to their spongy bulbs, and their glory
passed--they would be matted refuse on the shores and a man could
trample them. Yes, the sea was with Tedge, and the rivers, too; the
flood waters were lifting the lilies from their immemorable
strongholds and forcing them out to their last pageant of death.

The three castaways slept in the warm sand. It was an hour later that
some other living thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef. A
scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and
fall. Presently another, and then a slow line of them. They crossed
the higher ridge to huddle about a sink that might have made them
remember the dry drinking holes of their arid home plains. Tired,
gaunt cattle mooing lonesomely, w