Diane thought suddenly of a late moon above a marsh.
"He--he can not follow me into those terrible wilds ahead," she thought
with sudden bitterness. "I shall be free at last from his dreadful
spying."
At sunrise one morning they bade Johnny adieu and struck off boldly
with the Indian wagon into the melancholy world of the Everglades.
"It is better," said Keela gravely, "if you wear the Seminole clothes
you wore at Sherrill's. They are in the wagon. My people love not the
white man."
"But--" stammered Diane.
"They will think," explained Keela shyly, "that you are a beautiful
daughter of the sun from the wilderness of O-kee-fee-ne-kee. You are
brown and beautiful. Such, they tell, was my grandmother. It is a
legend of my mother's people, but I do not think," added Keela
majestically, "that the wild and beautiful tribe of mystery who were
sons and daughters of the Sun, are half so beautiful as you!"
To the dull baying of the alligators in the saw grass, and the
melancholy croak of the great blue herons, Keela's wagon penetrated the
weird and terrible wilds of the Everglades, winding by the gloomy
border of swamps where the deadly moccasin dwelt beneath the darkling
shadow of cypress, on by ponds thick with lilies and tall ghostly
grasses, over tangled underbrush, past water-dark jungles of dead trees
where the savage cascade of brush and vine and fallen branches had
woven a weird, wild lacery among the trees, through mud and saw grass,
past fertile islands and lagoons of rush and flag--a trackless
water-prairie of uninhabitable wilds which to Keela's keen and
beautiful eyes held the mysteriously blazed home-trail of the Seminole.
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