"We go; maybe find him," the black giant grinned again, bending backward to get his shoulders beneath the ropes and then straightening up as though two, and not two hundred, pounds of weight came with him. I walked quickly out to the point and took one more look, a searching, lingering look across the green water. Nowhere was the _Whim_, nowhere even a speck of sail or any other craft. Except for a pelican of sober mien, rising and falling with the waves, the Gulf seemed barren of any life. But something told me that the yacht was safe. A scrub jay, in a near-by thicket of mangroves, mocked my solitude with a raucous note; yet it gave me heart, for I saw in it the call of the land and knew that thoughts of the _Whim_ must be put aside. So I went back to Smilax, and together we strode through the fringe of palms into a shadowy jungle; our faces set toward a mysterious place, unknown to us, where Death river meets the sea. CHAPTER XIV SMILAX BRINGS NEWS Intuitively I dropped behind and walked at the heels of Smilax who, as if he were treading a well-defined trail instead of unknown jungle land, moved with a free stride that challenged my endurance. Clinging vines pulled at my clothes as things alive, causing both noise and annoyance. Silence was a virtue on our present expedition. After an hour of this we came to a cypress swamp, and for several miles waded through water ankle-deep although on a bottom of firm sand. Hardly any undergrowth was here, but in all directions stood gray, dismal cypress trees, coarsely buttressed at the water's edge and tapering to slender tips. Draped in long streamers of Spanish moss which were delicately swayed by an almost imperceptible current of air, this was a ghoulish place--suggesting a rookery for shrouded spirits which perched along the bonelike branches awaiting their resurrection. Here, too, upon some convenient root of these gray ancients--perhaps the longest lived of our southern trees--lay coiled the dozing moccasin. And from this grim place we merged once more into the jungle where my clothes again became the prey of clawing things. But Smilax, never faltering, moved with the ease of a shadow. At last, by watching him I, too, came to learn his secret and was charmed to find that it made my pace both quiet and swift. Indeed, I took great care to practice this silent trail walking--a knack that can be acquired only by the closest observation; for a hundred books could not teach a hundredth part as much as a ten-mile hike at the heels of a trained woodsman when he is trying to go noiselessly. Finally he turned and looked at me, saying: "You do good now."