As he went along, his plan perfected itself.  He would get into loose shoes again, old ones, if money could buy them, and old clothes, too.  The bull-briers snatching at his tailored splendor suggested that.

He laughed when the Florida partridge, a small quail, whirred up from under his feet; he paused to exchange affectionate mockery with red squirrels; and once, even when he was brought up suddenly to a familiar and ominous, dry reverberation, the small, crisp sound of the rolling drums of death, he did not look about him for some instrument of destruction, as at any other time he would have done, but instead peered cautiously over the log before him, and spoke in tolerant admonition: 

“Now, Misteh Rattlesnake, yo’ jes min’ yo’ own business.  Nobody’s goin’ step on yo’, ner go triflin’ roun’ yo’ in no way whatsomeveh.  Yo’ jes lay there in the sun an’ git ’s fat ‘s yo’ please.  Don’ yo’ tu’n yo’ weeked li’l’ eyes on Gideon.  He’s jes goin’ ‘long home, an’ ain’ lookin’ foh no muss.”

He came presently to the water, and, as luck would have it, to a little group of negro cabins, where he was able to buy old clothes and, after much dickering, a long and somewhat leaky rowboat rigged out with a tattered leg-of-mutton sail.  This he provisioned with a jug of water, a starch box full of white corn-meal, and a wide strip of lean razorback bacon.

As he pushed out from shore and set his sail to the small breeze that blew down from the north, an absolute contentment possessed him.  The idle waters of the lagoon, lying without tide or current in eternal indolence, rippled and sparkled in breeze and sunlight with a merry surface activity, and seemed to lap the leaky little boat more swiftly on its way.  Mosquito Inlet opened broadly before him, and skirting the end of Merritt’s Island he came at last into that longest lagoon, with which he was most familiar, the Indian River.  Here the wind died down to a mere breath, which barely kept his boat in motion; but he made no attempt to row.  As long as he moved at all, he was satisfied.  He was living the fulfilment of his dreams in exile, lounging in the stern in the ancient clothes he had purchased, his feet stretched comfortably before him in their broken shoes, one foot upon a thwart, the other hanging overside so laxly that occasional ripples lapped the run-over heel.  From time to time he scanned shore and river for familiar points of interest—­some remembered snag that showed the tip of one gnarled branch.  Or he marked a newly fallen palmetto, already rotting in the water, which must be added to that map of vast detail that he carried in his head.  But for the most part his broad black face was turned up to the blue brilliance above him in unblinking contemplation; his keen eyes, brilliant despite their sun-muddied whites, reveled in the heights above him, swinging from horizon to horizon in the wake of an orderly file of little bluebill ducks, winging their way across the river, or brightening with interest at the rarer sight of a pair of mallards or redheads, lifting with the soaring circles of the great bald-headed eagle, or following the scattered squadron of heron—­white heron, blue heron, young and old, trailing, sunlit, brilliant patches, clear even against the bright white and blue of the sky above them.