She picked up a chip of rose-colored cedar and sniffed it daintily.
“Like a lead-pencil, isn’t it? Put that big log on the fire. The odor of burning cedar must be delicious.”
He lifted the great log and laid it across the coals.
“Suppose we lunch?” she proposed, looking straight at the simmering coffee-pot.
“Would you really care to?” Then he raised his voice: “Tiger! Tiger! Where the dickens are you?” But Tiger, half a mile away, squatted sulkily on the lagoon’s edge, fishing, and muttering to himself that there were too many white people in the forest for him.
“He won’t come,” said Haltren. “You know the Seminoles hate the whites, and consider themselves still unconquered. There is scarcely an instance on record of a Seminole attaching himself to one of us.”
“But your tame Tiger appears to follow you.”
“He’s an exception.”
“Perhaps you are an exception, too.”
He looked up with a haggard smile, then bent over the fire and poked the ashes with a pointed palmetto stem. There were half a dozen sweet-potatoes there, and a baked duck and an ash-cake.