"Oh, a lot anybody seems to care what be comes of me!" quivered Daphne. "Even Old-Dad didn't say 'Good-bye'. Even Creep-Mouse--didn't say Howdy! What's it all about?" she questioned tartly. "What's--what's [153] anything all about?" With a swift experimental impulse she slid over to the edge of the fore-deck and tested the shallow tide with one slender foot and ankle. In an other instant while the two men wrangled she had slipped over into the water and was speeding up the unknown beach. "I'll go find something of my own!" raged her wild little heart. "Something that _will_ say 'Good-bye' to me! Something that _will_ say 'Howdy!' Good--bad--living or dying--something all my own!" Indifferent to the clogging sand, impervious to the scratch and snag, stumbling over wreckage, dodging through palmetto, unconscious of her breathlessness, unhampered by her loneliness, fired only by a strange sort of exhilaration, a weird new sense of emancipation, she sped on through the excitant dark, till tripping suddenly on some horrid slimy thing like the dead body of a shark she pitched over head-first into a tangle of beach-grass, and crawling out on all fours into the clean, sweet sand again, crawled into the spurting flash of a revolver shot whose bullet just barely grazed the wincing lobe of her ear. [154] Tight as a vise a man's arms closed around her! "My God!" gasped a man's voice, "I thought you were a panther or a bear--or something!" Struggling to free herself Daphne snatched her small flash-light from her pocket and flamed it full on the man's face. "Why--what the--the dickens?" she babbled hysterically. "Why--how in the world?" she rallied desperately. "Well--I should think Martha _had_ 'got something!' Why--why, it's the--the Kissing Man!" she cried. With widening eyes and a dropped jaw the man returned the stare. "Y--you?" he stammered. Fumbling round through the sand for his own larger lantern he flashed a steadier flare of light upon the scene. "What--are--you--doing here--and crawling on your hands and knees?" he asked. His face was ashy gray. "Why, I'm running away!" glowed Daphne. Her eyes were like stars, the flush in her cheeks flaunting and flaming like a rose-colored flag. [155] "Running away?" quickened the man. "From what?" "I don't know!" laughed Daphne. "To--what?" questioned the man. "I don't care!" laughed Daphne. With another perceptible start the young man turned upon her. "Don't you know it's not safe for you to be alone like this?" he stormed. "Don't you know how wild this country is? Don't you know there are bears and panthers and wild cats and snakes and----. And I almost shot you," he repeated dully. "Except for this--this infernal tremor in my right hand that everybody is trying to cure me of--I should probably have killed you."