-bill ducks came swimming in scores, keeping up with the
horses so fearlessly and persistently that the girl turned in her saddle
and looked back at her father in delight.

"I'm certainly as gifted as the Pied Piper, dad! If they follow me to
Ruffle Lake I won't permit a shot to be fired."

While she spoke she kept her eyes on her father. Except for a brief good
morning at breakfast she had neither looked at nor spoken to Hamil,
making no noticeable effort to avoid him, but succeeded in doing it
nevertheless.

Like her father and brother and Hamil she was mounted on an unornamental
but wiry Tallahassee horse; and she rode cross-saddle, wearing knee-coat
and kilts of kahkee and brown leather puttees strapped from under the
kneecap to the ankle. Like the others, too, she carried a small shotgun
in a saddle boot, and in the web loops across her breast glimmered the
metal rims of a dozen cartridges. A brilliant handkerchief knotted
loosely around her bare white throat, and a broad Panama turned up in
front and resolutely pulled down behind to defy sunstroke, completed a
most bewilderingly charming picture, which moved even her father to
admiring comment.

"Only," he added, "look before you step over a log when you're afoot.
The fangs of a big diamond-back are three-quarters of an inch long, my
dear, and they'll go through leather as a needle goes through cambric."

"Thanks, dad--and here endeth the usual lesson."

Cardross said to Hamil: "One scarcely knows what to think about the
snakes here. The records of the entire Union show few deaths in a year,
and yet there's no scarcity of rattlers, copperheads, and moccasins in
this Republic of ours. I know a man, an ornithologist, who for twelve
years has wandered about the Florida woods and never saw a rattler. And
yet, the other night a Northern man, a cottager, lighted his cigar after
dinner and stepped off his veranda on to a rattler."

"Was he bitten?"

"Yes. He died in two hours." Cardross shrugged and gathered up his
bridle. "Personally I have no fear; leggings won't help much; besides, a
good-sized snake can strike one's hand as it swings; but our cracker
guides go everywhere in thin cotton trousers and the Seminoles are
barelegged. One hears often enough of escapes, yet very rarely of
anybody being bitten. One of my grove guards was struck by a moccasin
last winter. He was an awfully sick nigger for a while, but he got over
it."

"That's cheerful," said Hamil,