"But, hell, Smilax," I burst out laughing, "there'd be no sense in calling him feathers!"
"Efaw," he said again, "mean dog; kotee, toad; chesshe, rat. Maybe him dog-toad-rat!"
"That only begins to be him," I declared, with the same glorious contempt for pronouns. "In the prospective waters of Death river I christen him Efaw Kotee, the dog-toad!"—But in my heart I offered an apology to the canine family, many of whose sons and daughters have been among my most loyal friends.
"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.