eminole.

As Keela knew the trail, so surely from the rank, tropical vegetation
of the great Southern marshland she knew the art of wresting food.
Bitter wild oranges, pawpaws, oily palmetto cabbage, wild cassava,
starred gorgeously now with orange colored blossoms, and guavas; these,
with the wild turkeys and mallard ducks, turtles and squirrels and the
dark little Florida quail with which the wild abounded, gave them
varied choice.

Cheerfully fording miles of mud and water, his discomforts not a few,
came Philip, greatly disturbed by the incomprehensible whims of his
lady. By day he followed close upon the trail of the canvas wagon,
patterning his conquest of the aquatic wilderness about him after that
of Keela, hunting the wild duck and the turkey and discarding the
bitter orange with aggrieved disgust. And if Keela occasionally found
a brace of ducks by the camp fire or a bass in a nest of green
palmetto, she wisely said nothing, sensing the barrier between these
two and wondering greatly.

By night when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under
the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with
horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or
the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the
seat of the music-machine and slept through the twilight and the early
evening. When the camp ahead, glimmering brightly through the live
oaks, was silent, Philip awoke and watched and smoked, a solitary
sentinel in the terrible melancholy of the moonlit waste of ooze and
dead leaf and sinister crawling life.

So they came in time to the plains of Okeechobee and thence to the
wild, dark waters of the great inland sea--a wild, bleak sea, mirroring
cloud and the night-lamp of the Everglades. The wind wafting across on
night-tipped wings rippled the great water shield and brought its
message to the silent figure on the shore.

"So," sighed the wind of the Okeechobee, "he still follows!"

"Yes," said Diane, shuddering at the howl of a cat owl, "he has dared
even that!"

"Brave and resolute to plunge into the wilds with a music-machine!
Would he, think you, dare all this for the sake of--spying?"

"I--I do not know. I have wondered greatly. Still he has dared much
for it before."

"He asked you to remember--his love--"

"I--I dare not think of it. For every admission he made that night by
the marsh tallied with the terrible tale of Ronado