She came to me humming the song I had been whistling--an unconscious bit of flattery on her part, but it added to my pleasure. There is, after all, so much to be gained by hitching your wagon to a star, that I tried to believe she deliberately intended it. I would have hitched up oftener to that same star, except for the fact that stars sometimes get hot and furious at too many liberties, and switch their tails and kick the wagons of well-meaning people to smithereens. That it may be better to have had a stellar joy-ride and be sent to hell for speeding than keep your boots forever in the clay, I will neither affirm nor deny; but the prudent man hitcheth to the moon! As we went toward the fort she turned to me, asking: "Don't you think they should have been here sooner? Do you fear anything you won't tell me?" Her eyes were anxious, and I saw how insistent this worry had been. "Everything depends on how far Smilax had to go," I answered. "He'd never dream of coming back until the men gave up--and they might chase him half across the state! So a few extra days doesn't mean anything. They can't catch him, that's certain; and he and Echochee'll only stay away as long as they're pursued. They'll come through, I believe it sincerely; and your Chancellor, sweet Princess, will guard you with his life--with ten lives, if he had them." "I know that," she murmured, "and shan't worry if you tell me not to." "Then cheer up! Smilax is a past-master of the swamps and woods, take my word for it!" "I really suppose Echochee knows a great deal about them, too," she said, after a pause, "for when she was sixteen she had to leave the Reservation with her husband and hide him in the Everglades. She learned a great deal, then." "Why did she have to do that?" "He'd fought and killed another Indian, and the officers were expected. But in the fight he received a cut that made him blind. For ten years Echochee fed and clothed him, hunting alligators and watching her chance of slipping the skins to a market. By extreme stinting she finally saved enough to 'buy him loose'--her optimistic way of saying 'pay a lawyer for his defense.' Think, after being outcasts all that time, of leading a blind husband through half a hundred miles of wilderness, with the savings of ten years to wager on a chance of having him cleared!" "I hope he was," I declared. "In a sense he was, yes. He knew where she kept the money, and while she was in the lawyer's office persuading him to take the case, her husband stole it and sneaked away." I uttered a cry at this hideous ingratitude, and she glanced at me, gravely adding: "Then he got drunk and was run over by a train; so, in a sense, Echochee freed him, after all."