She picked up a chip of rose-colored cedar and sniffed it daintily.
"Like a lead-pencil, isn't it? Put that big log on the fire. The odor of burning cedar must be delicious."
He lifted the great log and laid it across the coals.
"Suppose we lunch?" she proposed, looking straight at the simmering coffee-pot.
"Would you really care to?" Then he raised his voice: "Tiger! Tiger! Where the dickens are you?" But Tiger, half a mile away, squatted sulkily on the lagoon's edge, fishing, and muttering to himself that there were too many white people in the forest for him.
"He won't come," said Haltren. "You know the Seminoles hate the whites, and consider themselves still unconquered. There is scarcely an instance on record of a Seminole attaching himself to one of us."
"But your tame Tiger appears to follow you."
He looked up with a haggard smile, then bent over the fire and poked the ashes with a pointed palmetto stem. There were half a dozen sweet-potatoes there, and a baked duck and an ash-cake.
"Goodness!" she said; "if you knew how hungry I am you wouldn't be so deliberate. Where are the cups and spoons? Which is Tiger's? Well, you may use his."
The log table was set and the duck ready before Haltren could hunt up the jug of mineral water which Tiger had buried somewhere to keep cool.
When he came back with it from the shore he found her sitting at table with an exaggerated air of patience.
They both laughed a little; he took his seat opposite; she poured the coffee, and he dismembered the duck.
"You ought to be ashamed of that duck," she said. "The law is on now."
"I know it," he replied, "but necessity knows no law. I'm up here looking for wild orange stock, and I live on what I can get. Even the sacred, unbranded razor-back is fish for our net--with a fair chance of a shooting-scrape between us and a prowling cracker. If you will stay to dinner you may have roast wild boar."
"That alone is almost worth staying for, isn't it?" she asked, innocently.
There was a trifle more color in his sunburned face.
She ate very little, though protesting that her hunger shamed her; she sipped her coffee, blue eyes sometimes fixed on the tall palms and oaks overhead, sometimes on him.
"What was that great, winged shadow that passed across the table?" she exclaimed.