e
horrible still, out of which the heat from a vertical sun distilled the
last atom of nauseating effluvia--all these choice spots we visited under
the guidance of the wretched Mink. I seemed to be missing nothing that
might discourage or disgust me.

He appeared to know the way, somehow, although my compass became
mysteriously lost the first day out from Fort Coquina.

Again and again I felt instinctively that we were travelling in a vast
circle, but Mink always denied it, and I had no scientific instruments to
verify my deepening suspicions.

Another thing bothered me: Mink did not seem to suffer from insects or
heat; in fact, to my intense annoyance, he appeared to be having a
comfortable time of it, eating and drinking with gusto, sleeping snugly
under a mosquito bar, permitting me to do all camp work, the paddling as
long as we used a canoe, and all the cooking, too, claiming, on his part,
a complete ignorance of culinary art.

Sometimes he condescended to catch a few fish for the common pan;
sometimes he bestirred himself to shoot a duck or two. But usually he
played on his concertina during his leisure moments which were plentiful.

I began to detest Samuel Mink.

At first I was murderously suspicious of him, and I walked about with my
automatic arsenal ostentatiously displayed. But he looked like such a
miserable little shrimp that I became ashamed of my precautions. Besides,
as he cheerfully pointed out, a little koonti soaked in my drinking
water, would have done my business for me if he had meant me any physical
harm. Also he had a horrid habit of noosing moccasins for sport; and it
would have been easy for him to introduce one to me while I slept.

Really what most worried me was the feeling which I could not throw off
that somehow or other we were making very little progress in any
particular direction.

He even admitted that there was reason for my doubts, but he confided to
me that to find these Coquina hills, was like traversing a maze. Doubling
to and fro among forests and swamps, he insisted, was the only possible
path of access to the undiscovered Coquina hills of Florida. Otherwise,
he argued, these Coquina hills would long ago have been discovered.

And it seemed to me that he had been right when at last we came out on
the edge of a palm forest and beheld that astounding blue outline of
hills in a country which has always been supposed to lie as flat as a
flabby flap-jack.

A desert of s