Chapter III: Part II: 106 (1)

I [107]

"EVERY man, once in his lifetime," gloated Jaffrey Bretton, "has craved the adventurous experience of being marooned on a coral island with a beautiful lady!"

From eyes that brooded only too soberly on the bright tropic scene all around her, Daphne shot back a faintly amused and frankly deprecatory smile.

"Oh, of course I meant an unrelated 'beautiful lady,'" murmured her father.

As swiftly as it had come the faint smile vanished again.

Shrugging the hot salt and sand from his blue-jersied shoulders her father gathered his bare brown knees into the curve of his bare brown arms and surveyed her suddenly with a most ferocious frown.

"Daphne," he ordered, "never inhale your smile! Nicotine itself is no more injurious to one's 'in'ards than is an inhaled smile." [108] With a sweep of the hand he seemed in that single moment to include the whole shining universe in the measure of his reproach. "Even with all--this," he demanded, "can't you be happy--_any_?"

Certainly no one could have denied that it was a shining universe!

Like a cake of white soap splashing in a pan of bluing, the little island gleamed in the Gulf! Whiteness beyond your wildest dreams of whiteness! Blueness beyond your wildest dreams of blueness! Pearl, azure, indigo, turquoise, ultramarine--all sizzling together in the merciless sun!

Green there was too, of course--the vivid, clattering green of majestic cocoanut palms, the virescent flare of beech-grass, the crisp fan of scrub palmetto, and always the great, glossy mangrove trees rearing like giant laurel bushes in the dark, dustless splendor. But green in the Gulf, somehow, always seems like man's idea, or woman's--a sheer after-thought, as it were, of shade or trimmings. All the blue gulf wants is glare--and the eternal chance to grind pale rain bow-tinted shells into white sand! [109]

Cuddled to the white sand but hiding from the glare, Jaffrey Bretton lolled in the pale shadow of an old wreck, staring out into the radiance. Half a rod away from him in a slim blue swimming suit that exactly matched his own, Daphne lay basking in her own sand nest.

Nothing else on land or sea dozed or dallied because of the heat.

"Slam--Bang--_Bang_" for a glistening mile the big billows boomed and roared on the beach. Fantastic as a shadow with a shine to it, the gray sharks slashed and reslashed through the churning tide! High overhead in inestimable thousands white gulls furled and feathered in ecstatic maneuver! Far on the outer reef bright Spanish mackerel leaped in the sun! And startlingly outlined across the horizon, as though in deliberate mockery of all man's futile efforts to walk on the water, a gigantic kite-shaped whipperee went reeling tipsily from wave to wave!

With a gasp of almost pagan joy Jaffrey Bretton repeated his question.

"Even with all this," he insisted, "can't you be happy--any?" [110]

"Oh, Old-Dad," shivered Daphne, "you know just as well as I do that I would be perfectly happy if only I could forget!"

"Forget what?" said her father.

"Forget the hideous thing the President called me!" quivered Daphne. "Forget that--that awful letter my room-mate's mother wrote me! . . . Forget the newspapers! . . . Forget--forget--_everything_!"

With a shrug of his shoulders, Jaffrey Bretton gestured back to the camp fire at the edge of the cactus thicket where, crouched before the fragrant coffee pot in a scarecrow suit of gay-colored ginghams, a weirdly majestic looking old man with long scraggly hair and sharply aquiline features added the one tragic note to the scene.

"Lost Man has--'forgotten everything,'" he confided, a bit dryly.

"Forgotten everything?" repeated Daphne.

"Everything except how to make coffee," said her father, "or fry a bit of fish now and then! Forgotten who he is, I mean! Forgotten who he was! Forgotten even who he intends to be! That's rather the trouble, it seems, with this forgetting business! When [111] you once start out to 'forget' there doesn't seem to be any special discrimination about it! Your father's name, the location of your banker, the price of turnips, the esthetic value of brushing your hair all wiped out of existence by a single slop of the same sponge!"

"Yes, but Old-Dad----" parried Daphne.

With a smile that was almost caressing her father narrowed his gaze once more to the tragic old figure.

"Hanged if I don't think the old chap would die for me!" he attested. "But nothing on earth, it seems, could make him remember me! Seventy years old and seventy miles from a fish hook and seventy times battier than batty! That's the way I found him five or six years ago!"

"Yes, but where did you find him?" wakened Daphne. "How ever did you happen to find him?"

"Well, if the truth must be told," said her father, "I was hunting rather zealously at the moment for a pink curlew. It is against the law, I believe, to be hunting overzealously for a pink curlew. Way up one of those tortuous green waterways it was! An absolute [112] maze of mangrove islands! No conceivable footing, you understand, except that great bare fretwork of mangrove roots clawing down into the water! And every separate way you stared was just another dank green tunnel! Glossy leaves slapping along the sides of your canoe, dove-gray curlews blocking out the sky, alligators guzzling in every slimy bog hole! Had a little chunk of dry land, the old chap did, just about the size and substantiality of a crumpled-up newspaper, and a wigwam thatched like a cannibal hut with palm leaf fans! And there he lay in the damp and the heat and the buzz, too weak any longer to raise his head, but swearing like a trooper because in some inexplicable way he had missed the trading boat that chugged along his coast line every three months or so. For days and days, I suppose, he had rowed laboriously down to the mouth of the pass and leaned on his oars from dawn to dusk raking that blue horizon line for rice and 'white bacon' and coffee and matches and--life. It wasn't just that he was fastidious, you know! Raw curlew or raw jewfish would have tasted like pudding to him by then! [113] But something seemed to have happened to his shotgun and his last fish hook--rot, I suppose. Anyway, from grass floor to peak of that rattling palm-leaf hut there wasn't a single thing left but damp and heat and buzz! Yet somewhere up in the North, I suppose, or the East or the West, there's a baffled little family group still arguing round the evening lamp or over the morning porridge: 'Whatever in the world became of Father?' Wrecked by a typhoon or a bank defalcation, swerved from some perfectly sober path by the phantasia of a headache powder, driven to frenzy by the pattern of his dining-room wall paper 'Whatever in the world became of Father?'"

"Well, whatever did?" quickened Daphne.

"Oh, we chucked him into our canoe," said Jaffrey Bretton, "and took him back to the yacht, and from the yacht in due time to this same little coral island. And every quarter now, when the trading boat skirts the coast, it rather plans, I think, to throw a box of fodder ashore at the entrance to Lost Man's pass--whether Lost Man himself is in sight or not. And usually in the winter when I [114] come down I send a Seminole Indian back into that mad green maze to find him. No one but an Indian could find him, I imagine. And always, without the slightest question or demur, Lost Man comes and cooks for me. Yet never once, I think, has he shown a flicker of recognition beyond staring up bewilderedly through every first brew of camp coffee to inquire, 'Say, boss,--have--I--ever--cooked for you before?'"

"Oh, but Old-Dad!" cried Daphne. "Don't you think we ought to try and take him home?"

"Home to what?" frowned her father. With a sudden glance of a lover his eyes reswept the turquoise-colored tide. "Wouldn't any man," he questioned, "rather die on the Spanish Main--than live in an asylum? Also, incidentally," he murmured, "when a man has once formed the Seminole Indian sort of habit of living in a gay gingham jumper with or without trousers he doesn't slip over-easily, you understand, into linen collars again."

"Yes, but what about his family?" protested [115] Daphne, "and the awful tragedy of being lost?"

"God knows!" said her father. "But the awful tragedy of being lost is considerably less sometimes, I fancy, than the awful tragedy of being found! Every human catastrophe makes a lot of new problems of course--but it cancels, I imagine, just as many old ones. By land or sea there never was any smash-up yet, I suppose, that didn't release some poor soul with the cry, 'Now, I'll never have to tell! Now, they'll never need to know! Now, we'll never have to pay!' People who wondered how they could meet the coming day just didn't have to, that's all! And lads like our old friend here, Kiddie, are pretty apt to represent somebody's canceled problem. And anyway" (for comedy instead of tragedy he restaged his whole face suddenly by the shift of a single eyebrow), "and anyway, Kiddie," he laughed, "it must simplify life pretty considerably to forget everything in it except how to cook the one thing you like best! In your own case, for instance, what will you choose? Guava jelly? Or fudge?" [116]

"Guava jelly and fudge _nothing_!" flared Daphne. In another instant she was on her feet and speeding toward Lost Man.

"Whatever you do--don't start him swearing!" shouted her father. "Truly, I couldn't advise it!"

But heedless of everything except the intolerable mystery, Daphne was already at the camp fire poised like a slim wand of blue larkspur over the old man's crouching hulk.

"Must at least have been a Northerner once!" called her father, "or he'd never stand the shock of that bathing suit!"

Shrugging the raillery aside Daphne clutched out with desperate intensity at the old man's multicolored shoulder.

"Lost Man!" she flamed, "it's perfectly absurd for you to remember a silly little thing like how to make coffee and forget a great big important one like who you are! It doesn't make sense, I tell you? You must remember who you are! You must! You _must_! Lost Man, what is your name?"

"'Lost Man,'" answered the old chap, as though it had been Smith. [117]

"Yes, but where do you live?" cried Daphne.

"Here," said Lost Man.

"Yes, but after you leave here where do you go?" persisted Daphne.

"There," said Lost Man.

With a little wail of despair Daphne pointed back toward her father.

"What is that man's name?" she demanded.

"It doesn't matter," said Lost Man. "He has such a good face."

"Yes, but what's my name?" giggled Daphne.

As though just a little bit wearied by the catechism Lost Man resumed his coffee drinking.

"Everything is all the same," he said.

"But I tell you I won't be an 'All the Same!'" cried Daphne. "My name is Daphne! D-a-p-h-n-e! _Daphne_! Remember it now!" she admonished him. "You've simply got to remember something! . . . Daphne! Daphne! Daphne!"

With a curious little chuckle and a sudden cock of his head as though trying to locate the source of so unfamiliar a sound, Lost Man [118] reached out for the great long-handled camp spider and began quite unexpectedly to thrum it like a banjo, as, shaking his shaggy mane out of his eyes, he burst into song:

"Diaphenia, like a daffadown dilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily,
Heigho--Heigho----"

With a tiny scream Daphne swung back to ward her father.

"Why, Old-Dad!" she cried. "He's calling me 'Diaphenia'! It's an old, old song! Oh, an awfully old, old English song! It's in the Golden Treasury! You learn it in college! You never in the world would know it if you hadn't been to college!"

"Well, switch him back to the swearing if you'd like it better!" called her father. But already, with a leap and a run, he was on his way to prove the phenomenon with his own ears and eyes.

Quaveringly, but with determinate gallantry, Lost Man's guttural old voice carried the tuneful memory.

"Diaphenia like to all things blessed,
When all thy praises are expressed,
Heigh-o--Heigh-o." [119]

The scream that Daphne gave now scared even Lost Man out of his next line.

"Oh, I've thought of something perfectly wonderful!" she cried, and speeding into her tent returned with a large shining mirror clasped close in her arms. "Oh, you thought I was silly to bring it!" she admonished her father, "but maybe I wasn't so silly, after all! Maybe I'm going to work a miracle with it! Maybe this is the psychological moment!" Still with the mirrored surface gleaming from her like a bright breastplate she advanced slowly toward Lost Man till every inch of the quicksilver had taken its merciless toll of the scarecrow figure before it. "Now, Lost Man!" she triumphed, "look close! Look close! . . . _Who are you_?"

As indifferently as an animal Lost Man gazed into the mirror for an instant. Then, quite suddenly, with his neck yanked oddly forward, he stared direct into the reflection and staggered to his feet. Dumb with some inexplicable emotion he stood staring for a breathless moment from Jaffrey Bretton's utterly expressionless face to Daphne's excited eyes. Then, very deliberately the tip [120] of his tongue crept out to moisten his sun-parched lips.

"Do I look like _that_?" he pointed.

"Yes, I'm afraid you do," admitted Daphne in all honesty.

With a gasp like the gasp of a person strangling, Lost Man raised his arms to heaven. "My God! My God!" he cried, "I thought I was _young_!" And swinging sharply around he ran madly down the white beach into the white surf and out through the white surf into the blue churn and chop beyond, as though the horizon line itself was his ultimate goal. Outward through the indigo depths in long, slow, fiercely powerful strokes, floundering half erect through azure-colored shoals, merging for interminable seconds with the wild eddy and roar of far outlying breakers, silhouetted for one brief fantastic moment standing ankle-deep on the crest of a hidden sand bar with white gulls circling in a living halo around his head he passed, half whipperee, half miracle-man--into the unfathomable glare.

"Oh, Old-Dad!" gasped Daphne, "won't he be drowned?" [121]

More shaken than he liked to show, Jaffrey Bretton stooped for an instant to brush a tickle of imaginary sand from his instep.

"Not in a thousand years," he said, "but at least he will be--washed."

At some unfamiliar timbre of the voice Daphne crept timidly to him.

"Oh, Old-Dad," she faltered, "you don't really suppose, do you, that he's been lost ever since he was--young?"

"God knows," said Jaffrey Bretton. "Only, next time you have a wonderful idea, Kiddie,--keep it muzzled for a day or two until you make sure it won't bite."

"Oh, but Old-Dad!" quivered Daphne, "I--I didn't mean to hurt him! Truly, I didn't! I----"

"You didn't hurt him," said her father. "Like all merciful executions, he never knew what hit him!" With a gesture frankly rompish he reached out and grabbed Daphne by her wrist. "Come on, Kiddie!" he challenged, "let's have a race up the beach!"

By the time the race was over there wasn't enough breath left in either of them to talk about anything. Merged in the sand again, [122] scorched by the sun, fanned by a great clattery clump of scrub palmetto, they curled up in half a shadow and fell asleep.

It was Jaffrey Bretton who woke first.

"Poor--devil," was the first phrase on his lips.

"Who?" yawned Daphne.

"I!" said her father quite quickly. "I was worrying about my dog."

"O--h," yawned Daphne.

"Oh--yourself!" yawned her father.

It was Daphne who woke first the next time, and she woke with her fingers clutching hard into her father's startled shoulder.

"Oh, Old-Dad!" she cried. "There's a lady walking on my beach!"

Heavy with sleep, Jaffrey Bretton struggled laboriously upward and shook his white hair from his eyes just in time to face the intruder as she rounded the nearest cactus thicket.

"Why--why--good afternoon, Lady-Walking-on-our-Beach!" he said.

The scream that the lady gave, though distinctly shrill was yet quite unmistakably a [123] khaki scream, the scream, as it were, of a sportswoman, a mere matter of atavism only.

"_Oh_! How you startled me!" she cried.

It was at least very becoming to the lady to be startled, though all around the edges of the frank confession her lips showed still their stark, atavic pallor, and the clever gray eyes that searched the two blue-jersied figures before her were rather extravagantly dilated.

"Is--is this Martha's Island?" she questioned just a little bit abruptly.

"It is not!" said Jaffrey Bretton with some coldness. "Martha is a crazy lady. Do we look to you like crazy ladies?"

"Oh, no--of course not," flushed the intruder. "Only--only it is so awfully hard sometimes to place people without their clothes."

"Without their clothes?" flared Daphne. "Why these are our clothes! Our very own clothes!" As though in indisputable proof of the assertion she edged even closer to her father's side and began to stroke such shoulder and such sleeve as her father's swimming suit boasted.

But, gentle as the gesture was, it only served [124] somehow to increase the Intruding Lady's nervousness.

"Why--of course--I--I didn't mean that," she stammered. "It's only that that running on you so suddenly the way I did, I----" With a gesture of sheer helplessness she threw out her hands. "Well, there _are_ so many queer people down here!" she cried. "Fanatics and fruit growers and runaway people--and--and fanatics!" In an access of bewilderment her glance swept out across Daphne's slim, nymph-like loveliness to the wild island scene all around them, and back again to Jaffrey Bretton's distinctly sophistcated eyes. "For all I know," she affirmed with a palpable effort at lightness, "_you_ may be fugitives from justice!"

"Call us rather--fugitives from injustice," bowed Jaffrey Bretton, with the faintest possible smile.

Tugging at the brim of her brown khaki hat, fumbling at the collar of her brown khaki shirt, patting at the flare of her brown khaki skirt, the Intruding Lady began very suddenly to tinker with her personal appearance. [125]

"Now, isn't that funny?" jerked Daphne. "Whenever my father smiles, smiles like that, I mean--so faint, so twinkly--every woman in sight except myself begins to straighten her hat and----"

"Hush such nonsense!" ordered her father.

But the Intruding Lady, without showing an atom of resentment, wilted right down in the hot sands and began to laugh. It was a clever laugh, too, though still just a little bit wobbly round its edges.

"Please excuse me for being so hysterical," she begged. "But it's been such a queer day! And I've just had such a dreadful fright I hardly know who's crazy and who isn't!"

"A fright?" deprecated Jaffrey Bretton with increasing formality.

"Yes! Coming ashore just now," cried the Intruding Lady, "I thought I saw a man walking on the water! Way out in the Gulf it was! Almost a mile I should think! But when I looked again it was a fish!" very faintly, but none the less palpably her teeth began to chatter. "But when I looked _again_ it was a man! It _was_!"

"Nothing at all to be alarmed about," [126] interposed Jaffrey Bretton quickly; "it was just our butler doing his calisthenics."

"Your--butler?" stammered the Intruding Lady.

"Yes--you have probably noticed that the water is exceedingly thin in spots" then with a precipitate return of his manners Jaffrey Bretton waved her toward the green-shadowed sand nest which he had just vacated.

"Have a shade, madam!" he begged her. "You seem quite out of breath! And as though you had been running!"

"Running?" rallied the lady. "I have been galloping!" Rather cautiously, but none the less gratefully, she edged her way into the wavy green shadow. "And even after I got ashore," she confided, "I met such queer things on the beach! Oh, pelicans, I mean," she added hastily, "and fiddler crabs! Crowds and crowds of----"

"We shall have to have a traffic cop," mused Jaffrey Bretton. But even as he mused he stood with one hand shading his eyes while he raked the vacant horizon line for some thing that seemed to perplex him.

"When you spoke of coming ashore just [127] now," he turned and asked the lady quite abruptly, "just what, may I ask, were you on?"

"I was on a--on a honeymoon," said the lady.

"A honeymoon?" jumped Daphne.

"And being inexpressibly bored," said the lady, "I----"

"You are frank, to say the least," murmured Jaffrey Bretton.

"'Frank?'" said the lady. "I was desperate! So when the others took all the launches to go off and hunt for some kind of a fish, a sail fish I think it was, I pretended that I had a headache and stayed behind in my cabin, and the first moment even the engineer was out of sight I just slipped into the canoe and paddled ashore. Having heard, you see," explained the lady, "about all the queer people hidden away on some of these islands--it just occurred to me, you see, that----"

"All of which is very interesting, of course," said Jaffrey Bretton, "but honor compels me to advance a few little observations of my own. Yonder, through that maze of gulls," he pointed, "I note the only smoke on [128] the horizon which leads me to infer that, having camouflaged your absence not only wisely but too well, the yacht and bridegroom in question are already steaming southward at a very reasonable mileage. For the Caribbean, doubtless? Always have I understood that the Caribbean was a really rather remarkable place for honeymoons!"

But already, with a little choking gasp, the Intruding Lady was on her feet staring frantically in every direction. Her face was horridly white.

"Quick!" she cried. "We must get the canoe and try to catch them!"

"Your knowledge of nautical matters is charming," bowed Jaffrey Bretton. "But though one may often put to sea in a canoe he does not readily put to Gulf. The unfortunate typhoonish treachery of these waters, the peculiarly hoydenish habits of sharks, the----"

"We--must--get--the--canoe!" insisted the lady.

"Why, how silly!" roused Daphne. "Why, it would take weeks and weeks!"

"And in this impetuous climate," deprecated [129] her father, "how dispiriting to arrive at last only to find that the recreant bride groom had already taken unto himself another bride."

"Your levity is quite uncalled for," frowned the lady. "When I think of the anxiety I have caused my party the commotion there will be on board the yacht as soon as my absence is discovered, the----"

"Oh, of course we could advertise," suggested Jaffrey Bretton cheerfully, "stating the latitude and longitude, and the more explicit directions that it's the island that almost always has eleven pelicans sitting on the sand bar. And we could train our butler, I suppose, to swim out from time to time to the passing yachts and houseboats with a placard in his mouth saying, Found: 'A Brown Khaki Lady'. But unless we have a little more definite identification--" he turned and addressed the lady with some incisiveness.

In spite of herself and quite inexplainably the lady began to smile. Simultaneously with the smile she unwound the brown veil from her brown hat, and snatching off the hat itself bared her bright head to the breeze. [130]

"Just mention that I have red hair," she said. "Names are altogether too easily assumed to be practical for identification purposes."

"Yet more ladies, I suppose," murmured Jaffrey Bretton, "travel under assumed hair than under assumed names."

"Why, Old-Dad!" protested Daphne. In a sudden flare of interest her whole attention focused on the lady. "My! but your hair _is_ red!" she cried. "And such heaps of it! Why, goodness!" she stammered, "you're almost as young as I am!"

"It's delightful of you to think so," smiled the lady. "But even you, I'm afraid, will never rate me as young as this--this--your father, was it, you said?"

"I don't quite understand what you mean?" sobered Daphne.

"People almost never understand what ladies mean," said her father. "But the inference is, of course, that this one refers at the moment to my somewhat callow conversation. However," he continued, perfectly blithely, "I see no reason why we shouldn't all be very happy together--until such time at least as my own [131] launch returns with its remodeled engine. But meanwhile when did you eat last?" he turned abruptly to ask the lady with sincere concern.

"Last night," conceded the lady. "Truly I did have a bit of a headache."

"Our grapefruit are not iced," mused Jaffrey Bretton, "and we pour our butter from a pitcher--which is not the custom, of course, on Gulf-going yachts but as camp food goes----" With a little swift smile he reached out his hand to Daphne and drew her to her feet. "Dinner is served, ladies!" he said, and started up the beach.

Still holding tightly to one hand Daphne followed half a step behind him.

"The sun's so hot and--the sand's so thick--and the shells are so sharp," she called back cordially to the Intruding Lady, "you'd find it heaps easier, too, if you'd take Old-Dad's other hand!"

"No, I thank you!" said the Intruding Lady, but plowed along valiantly after them.

The sun was hot! The sand was thick! The shells were very sharp! No shade for almost a mile except the occasional lattice-like [132] flicker of a sea gull's flight! But close at their side the Blue Gulf pounded and splashed in ecstatic spray. And towering high above the sallow glare of beach-grass and cactus thicket the bright green cocoanut palms clattered and fanned with at least the sound of coolness!

"I--I suppose I'll have to keep the lady in _my_ tent," whispered Daphne.

"Your supposition is perfectly correct," said her father.

"She's got rather nice eyes, I think," whispered Daphne. "And the cutest hair!"

"Has she really?" said her father.

At the sudden sharp wince in the little hand that had nestled so confidently in his own he glanced back just in time to catch the look he so dreaded in her eyes.

"I--I suppose I ought to tell her," suffered Daphne.

"Tell her--what?" snapped her father.

"Why--my--my story," stammered Daphne. "It wouldn't be quite honorable not to, would it?" Desperately the young lips tried to recapture some kind of a humorous smile. "Tell--her I mean--quite frankly, you [133] know--that I'm more or less of a notorious character." In a single quiver the young mouth stripped itself of even this futile attempt at mirth. "No decent woman would ever _choose_ to associate with me again, the President said."

In an outburst of quite irrelevant temper, Jaffrey Bretton swung around to wait for the Intruding Lady.

"Is this a tortoise race?" he demanded accusingly. "Are we to die here in our tracks of hunger and thirst?" Without so much as a "By your leave" he snatched the Intruding Lady's hand in his spare one and plunged onward again. As they raced across the spongy, tide-swept sand bar just ahead of a huge blue wave and sighted the white tents at last, he tossed back his head with a whoop of extravagant mirth. "Whatever in the world have I done," he demanded of earth, air, sky, sea, "that I should be marooned on a coral island with _two_ beautiful ladies--one of whom is my daughter and the other the bride of another man?"

"S-s-h!" warned Daphne with a twitch of the hand. "There's a stranger at the camp [134] fire!" Dropping her father's fingers and quite ignoring the other lady she ran swiftly ahead, and dodging into a thick clump of beach-grass crouched down like a young Indian to study out the mystery. "Oh, Old-Dad!" she signaled back with her finger on her lips, "it's the--sissiest-looking man! Such queer little narrow shoulders! And the mooniest eyes! And a beard like a silk hand kerchief!"

"Must be the Outlaw," said her father

"The Outlaw?" protested Daphne. "Oh, dear me!" she cried suddenly. "He's seen me! And he's skulking off through the grass with a great roll of furs or something under his arm! Quick! Maybe we're robbed!" Darting out into full view on the beach she stood poised for a single uncertain instant while the Outlaw, as though by magic, vanished from sight.

"Robbed! Oh no," laughed her father. "It's your bathing suit! Next to being the honestest man I know this particular Outlaw happens to be also the most squeamishly modest. Creep around the back way by the [135] palmettos," he ordered, "and put on a skirt! I want to see him!"

Dropping the Brown Khaki Lady's fingers he cupped his hands to his mouth and began to halloo across the little distance.

"Hi there, Alliman!" he called.

"How-do, Mr. Bretton!" came the soft-voiced answer very cautiously, then, from the thicket the man himself emerged with the roll of wildcat skins still clutched in his arms. Daphne certainly had not exaggerated the gentleness of him, nor the narrow shoulders, nor the silky old-fashioned brown beard, nor the bland eyes.

"Come to trade me those cat skins for some pipe tobacco and oranges?" smiled Jaffrey Bretton.

"I--don't--mind," drawled the Outlaw.

As one to whom Time meant nothing nor ever would again, he sat down on the edge of the old wreck and drew his empty pipe from his pocket.

"Just behind that broken spar there you'll find a tobacco tin, I guess," said Jaffrey Bretton. "I rather plan to cache more or less of it around on such shelf-room as the island [136] affords. . . . It's such a blamed nuisance to get way off up the beach somewhere and find you've forgotten your 'baccy'. That's the only conceivable fault I could find with this island," he mused. "There's so little closet room and practically no shelves!"

"Puff, puff, puff," without a flicker of expression the Outlaw sucked at his pipe. "Puff, puff--puff--puff, puff."

With a gesture toward the tents, a nod toward the retreating back of the Brown Khaki Lady, Jaffrey Bretton essayed to re-crank the conversation.

"My ladies," he confided, "have been swimming--wading--running not to say--yachting!"

"Pretty ladies!" blushed the Outlaw.

"Thank you," bowed Jaffrey Bretton.

"Puff, puff, puff, puff, puff," sighed the Outlaw's pipe.

Very deftly Jaffrey Bretton reached round behind the broken spar for a smoke of his own.

"Any special news this last year?" he asked.

Thoughtfully, from the long monotonous months of heat and glare and squalor and [137] privation and almost absolute isolation, the Outlaw extracted as a sheer gift the one comely fact.

"I--seen--a whole bunch of pink--curlew," he said.

"The deuce you did!" brightened Jaffrey Bretton.

"Any news--up--your way?" droned the Outlaw.

From Europe, Asia, Africa--from the courts of kings and the gossip of queens, from a hundred adventures, from a hundred glittering memories Jaffrey Bretton traded gift for gift.

"I saw the World's Series," he confided. "I saw Frank Baker make his two home-runs."

"N--o?" shivered the Outlaw. Very slowly he removed the pipe from his mouth. For an instant only, a muscle twitched like a sob in his grizzled throat. As though suddenly consumed with bashfulness, he began to shuffle his bare toes in the sand. "Got--got the same President as usual?" he ventured at last.

"As far as I know," said Bretton. "I was in Washington three weeks ago." [138]

"Orange crop good up-state?" persisted the listless voice.

"Good enough, I guess," acquiesced Bretton.

"Anything--special--in the papers these days about Alabamy?" mumbled the pipe-clenched lips.

"Alabama's still on the map," admitted Bretton.

"Puff--puff--puff," mused the Outlaw. Then very limply he struggled to his feet. "Say, Martha wants you," he said.

"Martha?" puzzled Jaffrey Bretton. "Wants _me_? . . . What for?"

"She don't say," said the Outlaw, "but she wants you--quick."

"Quick?" gibed Jaffrey Bretton.

"She sure wants you quick," repeated the Outlaw.

"Oh, all right, we'll go now," acquiesced Jaffrey Bretton, "just as soon as I can jump into my khakis! Why, I wouldn't fail Martha for anything in the world! Why, that time the catfish stung me she----" Quite precipitate his face darkened, and then cheered again. "Oh, of course I haven't my [139] launch here," he acknowledged, "but we can go in yours!"

"Oh--no," protested the Outlaw gently. "It'll be night coming back, and I don't calculate on going nowheres in the dark. . . . It ain't healthy to travel in the dark. . . . My mother back home, she always say it ain't healthy no ways to travel in the dark."

"Oh, nonsense!" said Jaffrey Bretton. "Why, Martha may be ill!"

"She sure has got something," sighed the Outlaw, "but it ain't a dyingness. To-morrow'll do."

"It certainly won't do--if Martha's in trouble!" cried Jaffrey Bretton. "We'll go this minute! . . . Wait till I tell the ladies, and we'll all be along just as soon as we can grab up a bite to eat!"

Like a man smitten in his tracks, the Outlaw stopped short and began to twirl his battered slouch hat in his hands.

"Oh--not the ladies!" he protested wanly.

"Sure, we'll take the ladies!" insisted Bretton. "It will be quite an adventure for them."

Dumbly the Outlaw stared for a [140] moment from the Gulf to the sky and back to Jaffrey Bretton's smile again.

"You ain't forgotten Martha's little peculiarity, has you?" he whispered, "about red?" In frankly abject misery he began to retwirl his hat. "One of them ladies had red hair, I notices," he said.

With a whoop of joy, Jaffrey Bretton tossed back his own white head.

"I guess we could muffle it," he laughed.

But the Outlaw recognized no mirth in any thing at the moment.

"It ain't so easy to muffle ladies," he said.

"Oh, shucks!" persisted Jaffrey Bretton. "Trot along."

Reluctantly the Outlaw turned and started for his boat.

"My engine ain't running any too good," he confided plaintively.

"They never do," said Jaffrey Bretton.

"'Tain't near likely there's enough gas," deprecated the Outlaw.

"There never is," said Jaffrey Bretton.

With a gesture of sheer weariness the Outlaw submitted to his fate.

"Oh, very well this time," he said, "but I'm [141] going to move. I likes you fine, Mr. Bretton, but I sure am a-going further off. What with Lost Man and Martha this here Gulf is getting too crowded."

Cocking his head abruptly toward the sound of metal ringing on metal, Jaffrey Bretton gestured toward the mangrove-shadowed cove.

"There's good old Lost Man now," he said, "tinkering with your engine."

"Oh--Lost Man's all right," admitted the Outlaw, "only he ain't got any tact."

"Oh, shucks!" repeated Jaffrey Bretton. "_Trot_ along, I say! . . . But go over to the food tent first and pick out your trade for the cat skins. Whatever's fair, you know? Anything you please. . . . Strawberries, asparagus, chili con carne--anything, you know, except caviar."

"Yes--I know," rallied the Outlaw. With the slightest possible accentuation of his pace he started up the beach.

Still laughing to himself Jaffrey Bretton bolted for his tent and his khakis.

"Hurry up--hurry up--hurry up!" he called across to the tent that sheltered Daphne [142] and the Intruding Lady. "We're going on an adventure! Heaven knows what it is but something is the matter with Martha. . . . Be sure and bring your sweater--we're liable to be out all night!"

In an incredibly short space of time he reappeared on the "tote path" hurrying back and forth between the camp and the launch with a great jug of drinking water, a khaki-colored blanket or two, and indeterminate tins of coffee and milk and meat.

Very frankly bewildered, but conscientiously determined to be a good sport, the Brown Khaki Lady hurried to help him.

Deflected by some sudden adolescent dreaminess, Daphne was the last to emerge from her tent. In her white shoes and stockings, her short white skirt, her simple little white middy-blouse and severe white tam, all her wild, nymphlike beauty of the surf and the beach seemed to have reverted into sheer childish loveliness and austerity. Craving a yellow cactus bloom to stick in her belt, she plunged off first into the nearest thicket. Chasing a bright blue butterfly, she decided just as impulsively to explore the farther [143] palmetto. Then altogether contritely she started out to find her own way back to the waiting launch and her companions.

Green and dank and lacelike as the vegetation of an aquarium the great trees traced their leaves and branches against the sky. Close in a little bush a storm-blown scarlet bird twittered and preened in its temporary sacristry. High over all throbbed the ecstasy of the surf.

"Oh--_beautifulness_!" gasped Daphne. "In all the world," she thought, "is there any word this moment except just _beautifulness_?"

Then quite suddenly from the green maze just beyond her she heard a word that some other person evidently seemed to consider the biggest word of the moment, and that word was "Jaffrey!" _Jaffrey_? . . . Of all things!

With a lurch of her heart she darted forward just in time to see her father and the Brown Khaki Lady standing like the picture of the Huguenot lovers, with their hands on each other's shoulders. . . . And there was a laugh on the Brown Khaki Lady's lips! But there were tears in her eyes! [144]

"Jaffrey!" cried the Brown Khaki Lady, "since--when have you boasted a daughter?"

Stricken with astonishment and resentment at the deception which had been practised upon her, Daphne dashed out into the open only to find that at some shriller cry than hers both her father and the lady were speeding madly toward the beach, where, huddled somewhat conglomerately in the bow of the launch, the Outlaw was holding Lost Man at bay with a distinctly businesslike-looking gun.

"What in thunder's the matter?" shouted Jaffrey Bretton.

For a single relaxing instant the Outlaw glanced back across his narrow shoulder.

"This-here Lost Man ain't got any tact," he sighed.

"Put that gun down!" cried Bretton. "Why, the poor old chap's twice your age!"

"And--twice my size," confided the Out law. But he lowered the gun at least an inch.

"But what's it all about?" insisted Bretton.

Very gloweringly Lost Man essayed to be the real explainer. [145]

"He was silly about a crab," glowered Lost Man.

"'Tweren't, either, silly," argued the Outlaw. "He stepped on a crab and hurted it. There ain't no call to hurt nothing, I say."

"Nice one to talk, you are!" snarled Lost Man. "You--you man-killer, you!"

Quicker than a flash the Outlaw raised his gun again.

"I ain't no man-killer," he droned. "I ain't never in my life killed no man. What I killed was two men--both coming at me double. There ain't no man living, I tells you, more peaceful than me. . . . But when I'm moonshining"--in an instant the flaccid lips had tightened into a single merciless line--"but when I'm moonshining I don't stand no monkeyshining!"

"Oh, cut it out!" said Jaffrey Bretton. "Here come the ladies!"

"I forgot the ladies!" collapsed the Outlaw. Blushing like a schoolboy he tucked his gun back in his belt, and began to tinker with the engine.

But the ladies, it seemed, were not over-quick about coming. [146]

A little impatiently Jaffrey Bretton turned back to meet them. The Brown Khaki Lady was frankly scared. But Daphne, though white as a sheet, admitted no trepidation.

"Oh, don't you think he's too dangerous to go with?" shivered the Brown Khaki Lady.

"Nonsense!" laughed Jaffrey Bretton. "He's as gentle as a lamb."

"If you handle him right," supplemented the Brown Khaki Lady.

"Isn't most everything dangerous," laughed Jaffrey Bretton, "if you don't handle it right? A fifth-story window? A knife and fork? A blank sheet of paper? The buttons on your coat? Yet only a fool jumps through the fifth-story window, or tries to cram the sheet of paper into his eye, or--" With a gasp of apprehension he turned suddenly on Daphne. "You _are_ white!" he said.

Who was this woman--what was she to her father?

Twice Daphne opened her lips to cry out the question--the accusation, the bewilderment that was consuming her. Then, with a really heroic effort, she swung in her tracks and ran off at full speed toward the launch. [147]

"Hurry up, you--you slow-pokes!" she turned and called back when neither the quiver of her lips nor the blur of her eyes could be gleaned through the distance.

In another five minutes, with a great churn of water, a great chug of engine, a great stench of gasoline, the little old rickety launch was on its way.

It was still very bright, very hot; but already, as though for sheer weight and wiltedness, the huge sun lolled in its orbit, and like a turbulent bed smoothed out at last for the night the green mangrove-pillow and white sand-sheet of the fast-receding shore gleamed soft and cool at last above the taut blue blanket of the Gulf.

Perched high in the bow of the launch Daphne sat staring back at her traveling companions--the puny Outlaw, the gigantic Lost Man, her own most distinguished-looking father, and the mysterious lady. Like a crippled phonograph record her mind seemed to catch suddenly on that phrase "her most distinguished-looking father and the mysterious lady--the mysterious lady." . . . And they were all bound somewhere on a mysterious [148] errand--an all-night mysterious errand concerning some mad woman who didn't like red and--and----Quite alarmingly her heart began to pound and pound and pound! "And a month ago," she thought, "I was getting up when bells rang, and going to bed when bells rang, and thinking when bells rang, and stopping thinking when bells rang!" In a curious little shiver she looked up suddenly to find Lost Man's eyes fixed on hers with a distinctly benign and apostolic smile, but even as he smiled he hunched his shoulders up, clapped his hands together and burst once more into the old English song:

"Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily. . . ."

With a single outcry, Daphne tossed back her head and shrieked her nerves into space.

"Good!" said her father. "Now you'll feel better!" [149]

II

IT was dark when they sighted the yellow lantern light on Martha's Island. Darkness drops down so suddenly in the far south! It's rather spooky! Rather a nice spooky, though, if you happen to be a reasonably innocent Northerner looking for thrills. It's only poor souls like Lost Man and the Outlaw, and perhaps even Martha herself, to whom Darkness symbolizes a stab in the back, a shot from ambush, or God knows what!

To Daphne, this night, the darkness was all a-tingle with magic and pain. High overhead in ineffable crispness the blue-black dome of the sky seemed fairly crackling with stars. Close around her in murky mystery the great Gulf chuckled and prattled of coral and pearl. From the dark, huddled group in the stern of the boat not a face or a feature flared familiarly to hers. And drowned in the shuddering gasp and throb of the engine [150] her father's deep-voiced raillery, even the Brown Khaki Lady's light laughter, sounded like something from another world.

It was Daphne's own little world that concerned her most at that moment, a world in chaos!

"My father is false to me!" mutinied her wild little heart. "He has deceived me! And about a lady!" woke jealousy. "We didn't _need_ another lady! And what earthly reason could two people have for pretending to be strangers when they really were lovers? But how could two people possibly be lovers," she questioned suddenly with an entirely new stab of bewilderment and pain, "if one of them was already married to somebody else? If one of them indeed was actually on a honeymoon? Even though at the particular moment she might have run away from her honeymoon? Marriage was marriage, people said! You had to play it fair! Everybody had to play it fair! It was like a game! Even people who cheated in business wouldn't think of cheating in games! It wasn't good sportsmanship! It wasn't----" Feverishly her fancy quickened and raged at all its [151] pulses. "If my father isn't good," she tortured, "who is good? If my father isn't good, what is good? If my father isn't good--what's the use of anybody being good?"

Defiantly she lifted her eyes to the stars. And the stars laughed at her! Distractedly she turned her ear to the Gulf and heard the Gulf nudging the poor old launch in its ribs!

Then like the bumpy end of a dream, infinitely alarming, irresistibly awakening, the little launch snubbed its nose into wood in stead of a wave, and the voyage was over!

Gracing the upper step of a peculiarly water-logged and dilapidated looking pier the yellow lantern flared down its wan welcome to the voyagers' eyes. There was not a soul in sight, nor any sign of human habitation except the lantern and the ruined pier.

"Truly it must be very lonesome for a lantern--living all alone like this," observed the Brown Khaki Lady's faintly mocking voice.

Then suddenly out of the further shadows where pier and land presumably met, creeping low on its belly, and whimpering with [152] excitement, emerged a little dark body edging frenziedly toward them.

"Why--what the dickens?" cried Jaffrey Bretton. "Why, how in thunder? Well, I should think Martha _had_ 'got something'! Why it's Creep-Mouse!" he shouted, and jumped ashore.

Scramblingly the Brown Khaki Lady followed after him.

"Here! Wait for me!" she begged.

As he swung round to help her a single phrase passed his lips.

"Pull down your hat-brim!" he ordered. "In this light your hair looks almost crimson!"

Then man, and woman, and dog faded into the shadow.

With a grunt of indifference, Lost Man and the Outlaw resumed their eternal job of tinkering with the engine. Shadows working on shadows!

"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."

"Do you really mean," cried Daphne with a fresh shock of excitement, "that except for just one little chance I might be lying here dead this very minute? Dead and all over, I mean? Tennis and parties and new hats and everything all over and done with? As dead and all over as--as Noah?" she gasped.

"Yes," acknowledged the man.

Solemnly for a moment in the poignant awe of it all the jaded worldly-wise face and the [156] eager ingenuous young face measured this matter of life or death in the depths of each other's eyes.

Then for sheer woman-nature the girl edged a little bit nearer to the poor man who had almost killed her. And for sheer man-nature the man put his arm around the poor girl whom he had almost killed. It was sheer Nature's nature though that blew a strand of the girl's bright, fragrant hair across the man's lips.

With a sound like a snarl the man edged off again.

"Whew, but my nerves are jumpy!" he said. In the flare of the lantern light the scar on his face showed suddenly with extraordinary plainness, and as though a bit conscious of the livid streak he brushed his hand casually across his mouth and cheek bone. "Tell a fellow again," he said, "about this running away business. What's the game?"

"It isn't a game at all," flared Daphne. "I tell you I'm running away!" [157]

"But what about that stern parent of yours?" grinned the man.

"My father is more interested in another lady!" cried Daphne. "He's all but forgotten my existence. Oh, of course I don't mean he's deserted me," she explained with hysterical humor. "It's merely that for the time being and for all time to come," she quickened suddenly, "I've _got_ to have a life of my own!"

"It's an original idea," said the man.

At the faint tinge of mockery in the words all the hot, unreasoning anger surged back into Daphne's heart again.

"Oh, you needn't make fun of me!" she cried. "And you needn't try to stop me! I'm a Bretton, you know! And all the Brettons are wild! Oh, awfully wild! I read it in the paper! And I--I'm going to be the wildest of them all!"

"Just exactly--how wild--are you planning to be?" asked the man. Simultaneously with the question he lifted the lantern and flashed it like a spot-light on the girl's elfish beauty, the damp skirt moulding her slender limbs, the bright disheveled hair slipping [158] out from the prim little tarn, the sailor-collared blouse dragged down just a little bit too far from the eager, unconscious young throat! "Just exactly--how wild--are you planning to be?"

"Oh, as wild as _wild_!" gloated Daphne. "I'm going to have an aeroplane! I'm going to have a--a----"

With an odd little laugh the man jumped to his feet, and held out his hand to Daphne.

"Where I live," he chuckled, "aeroplanes grow on trees. You're just the little girl I'm looking for! Come along!"

"Come along where?" laughed Daphne, with her hand already in his.

"Oh, just 'along--along!'" urged the young man with a laugh that almost exactly duplicated her own. "For Heaven's sake never spoil a good start by worrying about a poor finish!"

"You talk just a little bit like my father," winced Daphne.

"Maybe I talk like him," laughed the young man, "but I don't walk like him! No more straight and narrow for me! You're perfectly right, little girl, about this game of [159] being good! I've tried it a whole month now--and believe me, there's--nothing in it! Why, even the gods don't intend you to be good!" he laughed. "When they proffer you sweets on a golden plate they certainly can't expect you to refuse 'em!"

"I never ate from a golden plate!" laughed Daphne, as snatching her little hand loose she jumped across the edge of a wave.

"Oh, please don't run away from _me! _" entreated the young man. "Whoever you run away from--oh, please don't run away from _me_! It isn't exactly fair, you know! It isn't----" Flashing his lantern aloft he stood for a single instant with his slender, fastidiously flanneled figure silhouetted incongruously against the wild, primitive background of cactus and wreckage. Then in a faint paroxysm of coughing, light and figure faded out.