Her delightful laughter made the forest silence musical.

“You poor boy!  No wonder your faith is strained.  The Crackers call the gopher a salamander, and they also call the land turtle a gopher.  Their burrows are alike and usually in the same neighbourhood.”

“Well, what I want to know is where you had time to learn all this?” he persisted.

“From my tame Seminole, if you please.”

“Your Seminole!”

“Yes, indeed, my dear, barelegged, be-turbaned Seminole, Little Tiger.  I am now twenty, Mr. Hamil; for ten years every winter he has been with us on our expeditions.  A week before we start Eudo Stent goes to the north-west edge of the Everglades, and makes smoke talk until he gets a brief answer somewhere on the horizon.  And always, when we arrive in camp, a Seminole fire is burning under a kettle and before it sits my Little Tiger wearing a new turban and blinking through the smoke haze like a tree-lynx lost in thought.”

“Do you mean that this aboriginal admirer of yours has already come out of the Everglades to meet you at your camp?”

“Surely he is there, waiting at this moment,” she said.  “I’d as soon doubt the stars in their courses as the Seminole, Coacochee.  And you will see very soon, now, because we are within a mile of camp.”

“Within a mile!” he scoffed.  “How do you know?  For the last two hours these woods and glades have all looked precisely alike to me.  There’s no trail, no blaze, no hills, no valleys, no change in vegetation, not the slightest sign that I can discover to warrant any conclusion concerning our whereabouts!”

She threw back her head and laughed deliciously.

“My pale-face brother,” she said, “do you see that shell mound?”

“Is that hump of rubbish a shell mound?” he demanded scornfully.

“It certainly is; did you expect a pyramid?  Well, then, that is the first sign, and it means that we are very near camp....  And can you not smell cedar smoke?”

“Not a whiff!” he said indignantly.

“Can’t you even see it?”

“Where in Heaven’s name, Shiela?”

Her arm slanted upward across his saddle:  “That pine belt is too blue; do you notice it now?  That is smoke, my obstinate friend.”

“It’s more probably swamp mist; I think you’re only a pretty counterfeit!” he said, laughing as he caught the volatile aroma of burning cedar.  But he wouldn’t admit that she knew where she was, even when she triumphantly pointed out the bleached skull of an alligator nailed to an ungainly black-jack.  So they rode on, knee to knee, he teasing her about her pretended woodcraft, she bantering him; but in his lively skirmishes and her disdainful retorts there was always now an undertone which they both already had begun to detect and listen for:  the unconscious note of tenderness sounding at moments through the fresh, quick laughter and gayest badinage.