whose bite is death.

The river flows into the gulf about half-way down the peninsula, and
here is the particular field of the geologist, rather than the
naturalist. For miles along the shore the underlying limestone and
coraline rocks crop up above the blue-green water, forming a natural
sea-wall. Here, in certain districts, the thickets have been cleared
away, wide areas planted to rice, and a few ancient colonial homes stand
fronting the sea. Also the sportsman fishes for tarpon beyond the
lagoons.

A strange, unhappy land of mystery; a misty, enchanted place whose
tragic beauty no artist can trace and whose disconsolate appeal no man
can fathom! Forests are never cheerful, silent and steeped in shadow as
they are, but these moss-grown copses beside the Ochakee, and crowding
down to the very shores of the gulf, have an actual weight of sadness,
like a curse laid down when the world was just beginning. Yet Grover
Nealman defied the disconsolate spirit of the land. He dared to disturb
the cathedral silence of those mossy woods with the laughter of carefree
guests, and to hold high revelry on the shores of that dismal sea.

CHAPTER II

The allurement of a September day had brought me far down the trail,
past the neck of the marsh, and far from my accustomed haunts. But I
could never resist September weather, particularly when the winds are
still, and the sun through the leaves dapples the trail like a fawn's
back, and the woods are so silent that the least rustle of a squirrel in
the thicket cracks with a miniature explosion. And for all the gloom of
the woods, and the tricky windings and cut-backs of that restless little
serpent of a trail, I still knew approximately where I was. A natural
sense of direction was seemingly implanted with less essential organs in
my body at birth.

The Ochakee River wound its lazy way to the sea somewhere to my right. A
half mile further the little trail ended in a brown road over which a
motor-car, in favorable seasons, might safely pass. The Nealman estate,
known for forty miles up and down the shore, lay at the juncture of the
trail and the road--but I hadn't the least idea of pushing on that far.
Neither fortune nor environment had fitted me to move in such a circle
as sometimes gathered on the wide verandas of Kastle Krags.

I was lighting a pipe, ready to turn back, when the leaves rustled in
the trail in front. It was just a whisper of sound, the faintest
scratch-sc