"They're a fine sight to see," mused the other, "after a man's eyes been burned out ridin' the dry range; no rain in nine months up there--nothin' green or pretty in----" "Pretty!" Tedge seemed to menace with his little shifty eyes. "I wish all them lilies had one neck and I could twist it! Jest one head, and me stompin' it! Yeh!--and all the damned flowers in the world with it! Yeh! And me watchin' 'em die!" The man from the dry lands smoked idly under the awning. His serenity evoked all the savagery of Tedge's feud with the lilies. Pretty! A man who dealt with cows seeing beauty in anything! Well, the girl did it--that swamp angel this Rogers was going to visit. That Aurelie Frenet who sang in the flower-starred river--that was it! Tedge glowered on the Texan--he hated him, too, because this loveliness gave him peace, while the master of the _Marie Louise_ must fume about his wheelhouse, a perspiring madman. It took an hour for the _Marie_ even to retreat and find steerage-way easterly off across a shallow lake, mirroring the marsh shores in the sunset. Across it the bayou boat wheezed and thumped drearily, drowning the bellowing of the dying steers. Once the deckhand stirred and pointed. "Lilies, Cap'n--pourin' from all the swamps, and dead ahead there now!" Scowling, Tedge held to the starboard. Yes, there they were--a phalanx of flowers in the dusk. He broke into wild curses at them, his boat, the staggering cattle. "I'll drive to the open gulf to get rid of 'em! Outside, to sea! Yeh! Stranger, yeh'll see salt water, and lilies drownin' in it! I'll show yeh 'em dead and dried on the sands like dead men's dried bones! Yeh'll see yer pretty flowers a-dyin'!" The lone cowman ignored the sneer. "You better get the animals to feed and water. Another mornin' of heat and crowdin'--" "Let 'em rot! Yer pretty flowers done it--pretty flowers--spit o' hell! I knowed 'em--I fought 'em--I'll fight 'em to the death of 'em!" His little red-rimmed eyes hardly veiled his contempt for Milt Rogers. A cowman, sailing this dusky purple bay to see a girl! A girl who sang in the lily drift--a-sailing on this dirty, reeking bumboat, with cattle dying jammed in the pens! Suddenly Tedge realized a vast malevolent pleasure--he couldn't hope to gain from his perishing cargo; and he began to gloat at the agony spread below his wheelhouse window, and the cattleman's futile pity for them. "They'll rot on Point Au Fer! We'll heave the stink of them, dead and alive, to the sharks of Au Fer Pass! Drownin' cows in dyin' lilies--" And the small craft of his brain suddenly awakened coolly above his heat. Why, yes! Why hadn't he thought of it? He swung the stubby nose of the _Marie_ more easterly in the hot, windless dusk. After a while the black deckhand looked questioningly up at the master. "We're takin' round," Tedge grunted, "outside Au Fer!"