"Very real," promised her father.
"Tents?" questioned Daphne.
"Yes," said her father.
"What will there be to eat?" brightened Daphne.
"Oh, canned goods," shrugged her father, "and warm oranges and grape-fruit, and heaps of salt pork, of course, and all the fresh fish we have strength to land—Spanish mackerel, sea trout, sharks."
"Not sharks?" thrilled Daphne. 102
"Ah, of course, we don't have to eat them," confessed her father.
"And people?" wilted Daphne again. "Will there have to be people?"
"Oh, only four or five probably," laughed her father, "and even those usually are scattered twenty-five or fifty miles apart. Oh, of course, now and then," he admitted in all honesty, "some gay Northern houseboat comes floating by. But mostly—somehow, all that part of the land, or rather of the water, seems inhabited by people who have made mistakes—made real mistakes, I mean—argued not wisely but too well with their mothers-in- law, or overdrawn their bank accounts with the butt of a pistol rather than with the point of a pen, or had a bit of 'rough play' somewhere upstate with an over-sensitive sheriff. We're going to have, for instance, a 'Lost Man' for a cook. Nice distinguished looking old city-spoken derelict who can't remember who he is, so most happily for him he can't remember what his mistake was. And on the next key just below us, twenty miles or so, there's an outlaw who killed two revenue officers 'up North in Alabama' somewhere. And inland just behind us there's a rather 103 good-looking woman who's gone batty on the subject of red. Can't bear red, it seems, and has come down there to wallow her nerves in the all-green jungle."
Big and dark and blue, Daphne widened her eyes to her father's.