"I see," said I, trying to speak carelessly; "you desire to pilot me." "I don't desire to but I gotta go with you." "An accurate map--" "Can it, old sport! A accurate map is all right when it's pasted over the front of your head for a face. But I wear the other kind of map _inside_ me conk. Get me?" "I confess that I do not." "Well, get _this_, then. It's a cash deal. If the goods is up to sample you hand me mine then an' there. I don't deliver no goods f.o.b. I shows 'em to you. After you have saw them it's up to you to round 'em up. That's all, as they say when our great President pulls a gun. There ain't goin' to be no shootin'; walk out quietly, ladies!" After I had sat there for fully ten minutes staring at him I came to the only logical conclusion possible to a scientific mind. I said: "You are, admittedly, unlettered; you are confessedly a chevalier of industry; personally you are exceedingly distasteful to me. But it is useless to deny that you are the most extraordinary man I ever saw.... How soon can you take me to these Coquina hills?" "Gimme twenty-four hours to--fix things," he said gaily. "Is that all?" "It's plenty, I guess. An'--say!" "What?" "It's a stric'ly cash deal. Get me?" "I shall have with me a certified check for ten thousand dollars. Also a pair of automatics." He laughed: "Huh!" he said, "I could loco your cabbage-palm soup if I was _that_ kind! I'm on the level, Perfessor. If I wasn't I could get you in about a hundred styles while you was blinkin' at what you was a-thinkin' about. But I ain't no gun-man. You hadn't oughta pull that stuff on me. I've give you your chanst; take it or leave it." I pondered profoundly for another ten minutes. And at last my decision was irrevocably reached. "It's a bargain," I said firmly. "What is your name?" "Sam Mink. Write it Samuel onto that there certyfied check--if you can spare the extra seconds from your valooble time." II On Monday, the first day of March, 1915, about 10:30 a.m., we came in sight of something which, until I had met Mink, I never had dreamed existed in southern Florida--a high range of hills. It had been an eventless journey from New York to Miami, from Miami to Fort Coquina; but from there through an absolutely pathless wilderness as far as I could make out, the journey had been exasperating. Where we went I do not know even now: saw-grass and water, hammock and shell mound, palm forests, swamps, wildernesses of water-oak and live-oak, vast stretches of pine, lagoons, sloughs, branches, muddy creeks, reedy reaches from which wild fowl rose in clouds where alligators lurked or lumbered about after stranded fish, horrible mangrove thickets full of moccasins and water-turkeys, heronry more horrible still, out of which the heat from a vertical sun distilled the last atom of nauseating effluvia--all these choice spots we visited under the guidance of the wretched Mink. I seemed to be missing nothing that might discourage or disgust me.