him, with his hands wrapped in his blue cotton handkerchief, arranged
like a muff.

Although Deal worked hard in his fields all day, he did not cook. In a
third out-building lived a gray-headed old negro with one eye, who
cooked for the new tenant--and cooked well. His name was Scipio, but
Carl called him Africanus; he said it was equally appropriate, and
sounded more impressive. Scip's kitchen was out-of-doors--simply an old
Spanish chimney. His kettle and few dishes, when not in use, hung on the
sides of this chimney, which now, all alone in the white sand, like an
obelisk, cooked solemnly the old negro's messes, as half a century
before it had cooked the more dignified repasts of the dead hidalgos.
The brothers ate in the open air also, sitting at a rough board table
which Mark had made behind the house. They had breakfast soon after
daylight, and at sunset dinner; in the middle of the day they took only
fruit and bread.

"Day after to-morrow will be Christmas," said Carl, leaving the table
and lighting his long pipe. "What are you going to do?"

"I had not thought of doing anything in particular."

"Well, at least don't work on Christmas day."

"What would you have me do?"

Carl took his pipe from his mouth, and gazed at his brother in silence
for a moment. "Go into the swamp with me," he urged, with sudden
vehemence. "Come--for the whole day!"

Deal was smoking, too, a short clay pipe, very different from the huge,
fantastic, carved bowl with long stem which weighed down Carl's thin
mouth. "I don't know what to do with you, boy. You are mad about the
swamp," he said, smoking on calmly.

They were sitting in front of the house now, in two chairs tilted back
against its wall. The dark, odorous earth looked up to the myriad stars,
but was not lighted by them; a soft, languorous gloom lay over the land.
Carl brushed away the ashes from his pipe impatiently.

"It's because you can't understand," he said. "The swamp haunts me. I
_must_ see it once; you will be wise to let me see it once. We might go
through in a canoe together by the branch; the branch goes through."

"The water goes, no doubt, but a canoe couldn't."

"Yes, it could, with an axe. It has been done. They used to go up to San
Miguel that way sometimes from here; it shortens the distance more than
half."

"Who told you all this--Scip? What does he know about it?"

"Oh, Africanus has seen several centuries; the Spaniards were living
here only