As Keela knew the trail, so surely from the rank, tropical vegetation
of the great Southern marshland she knew the art of wresting food.
Bitter wild oranges, pawpaws, oily palmetto cabbage, wild cassava,
starred gorgeously now with orange colored blossoms, and guavas; these,
with the wild turkeys and mallard ducks, turtles and squirrels and the
dark little Florida quail with which the wild abounded, gave them
varied choice.
Cheerfully fording miles of mud and water, his discomforts not a few,
came Philip, greatly disturbed by the incomprehensible whims of his
lady. By day he followed close upon the trail of the canvas wagon,
patterning his conquest of the aquatic wilderness about him after that
of Keela, hunting the wild duck and the turkey and discarding the
bitter orange with aggrieved disgust. And if Keela occasionally found
a brace of ducks by the camp fire or a bass in a nest of green
palmetto, she wisely said nothing, sensing the barrier between these
two and wondering greatly.
By night when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under
the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with
horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or
the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the
seat of the music-machine and slept through the twilight and the early
evening.
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