ness by distrust of all about him, he found the weird gloom of the
Everglades of a piece with the blackness of his mood. For days he had
taken wild chances that horrified Sherrill inexpressibly; drinking
clear whiskey in the burning white tropical sunlight, tramping off into
trackless wilds without a guide, conducting himself, as Sherrill
aggrievedly put it, with the general irrationality of a drunken madman.

"The climate or a moccasin will get you yet!" exclaimed Sherrill
heatedly. "And it will serve you right. Or you'll get lost. And to
lose your way in this infernal swamp is sure death. They used to enter
runaway niggers who came here, on the undertaker's list. I swear I
won't tell your aunt if you do disappear. That's a job for a deaf
mute. And only yesterday I saw you corner a moccasin and tantalize him
until the chances were a hundred to one that he'd get you, and then you
blazed your gun down his throat and walked away laughing. Faugh!"

With the perversity of reckless madmen, however, Carl went his
foolhardy way unharmed. But his nights were fevered and sleepless and
haunted by a face which never left him, and the locked hieroglyphics on
Themar's cuff danced dizzily before his eyes.

Carl presently lighted a lantern, seated himself at the camp table and
fell moodily to poring over the tormenting hieroglyphics which had
haunted him for days.

The night was cloudy. Only at infrequent intervals the moon soared
turbulently out from the somber cloud-hills and glinted brightly
through the live oaks overhead.

Carl had been drinking heavily since the morning, with vicious recourse
to the flute when his mood was darkest. Now he felt strung to a
curious electric tension, with pulse and head throbbing powerfully like
a racing engine. Still there was satanic keenness in his mind
to-night, a capacity for concentration that surprised him. Somewhere
in his head, taut like an overstrung ligament or the string of a great
violin, something sinister droned and hummed and subtly threatened.
For the hundredth time he made a systematic list of recurrent symbols,
noting again the puzzling similarity of the twisted signs, but no sign
appeared frequently enough to do vowel work.

To-night somehow the cipher mocked and gibed and goaded him to frenzy.
The mad angles pointing up and down and right and left--it was
impossible to sort them. They danced and blurred and crept
irresistibly into the wrong list.

And in e