ing cedar must be delicious."

He lifted the great log and laid it across the coals.

"Suppose we lunch?" she proposed, looking straight at the simmering
coffee-pot.

"Would you really care to?" Then he raised his voice: "Tiger! Tiger!
Where the dickens are you?" But Tiger, half a mile away, squatted
sulkily on the lagoon's edge, fishing, and muttering to himself that
there were too many white people in the forest for him.

"He won't come," said Haltren. "You know the Seminoles hate the whites,
and consider themselves still unconquered. There is scarcely an instance
on record of a Seminole attaching himself to one of us."

"But your tame Tiger appears to follow you."

"He's an exception."

"Perhaps you are an exception, too."

He looked up with a haggard smile, then bent over the fire and poked the
ashes with a pointed palmetto stem. There were half a dozen
sweet-potatoes there, and a baked duck and an ash-cake.

"Goodness!" she said; "if you knew how hungry I am you wouldn't be so
deliberate. Where are the cups and spoons? Which is Tiger's? Well, you
may use his."

The log table was set and the duck ready before Haltren could hunt up
the jug of mineral water which Tiger had buried somewhere to keep cool.

When he came back with it from the shore he found her sitting at table
with an exaggerated air of patience.

They both laughed a little; he took his seat opposite; she poured the
coffee, and he dismembered the duck.

"You ought to be ashamed of that duck," she said. "The law is on now."

"I know it," he replied, "but necessity knows no law. I'm up here
looking for wild orange stock, and I live on what I can get. Even the
sacred, unbranded razor-back is fish for our net--with a fair chance of
a shooting-scrape between us and a prowling cracker. If you will stay to
dinner you may have roast wild boar."

"That alone is almost worth staying for, isn't it?" she asked,
innocently.

There was a trifle more color in his sunburned face.

She ate very little, though protesting that her hunger shamed her; she
sipped her coffee, blue eyes sometimes fixed on the tall palms and oaks
overhead, sometimes on him.

"What was that great, winged shadow that passed across the table?" she
exclaimed.

"A vulture; they are never far away."

"Ugh!" she shuddered; "always waiting for something to die! How can a
man live here, knowing that?"

"I don't propose to die out-doors," said Haltren, laughing.

Again the hug