He fell into step beside her, and they walked up from the little cover through the beach-grapes and out among the scrubby dunes, where in the heated silence the perfume of sweet-bay and pines mingled with the odour of the sea.
Everywhere the great sulphur-coloured butterflies were flying, making gorgeous combinations with the smaller, orange butterflies and the great, velvet-winged Palamedes swallow-tail.
Lizards frisked and raced away before them, emerald tinted, green with sky-blue tails, grey and red; the little gophers scurried into their burrows along the tangled hammock's edges. Over the palm-trees' feathery crests sailed a black vulture, its palmated wing-tips spread like inky fingers against the blue. Somewhere in the saw-grass a bittern boomed and boomed; and the seagulls' clamour rang incessantly above the thunder of the surf.[177]
"I wonder," she murmured, "whether my sunburn makes me drowsy."
"It's the climate. You'll feel sleepy for a week before you are acclimated," he said.... "Why don't you put down the puppy and let him follow?"
She did so; and the little creature frisked and leaped and padded joyously about among the bayberry bushes, already possessed with the canine determination to investigate all the alluring smells in the world, and miss none of them.
After a little while they arrived at the bungalow which Constance had chosen. The girl pushed open the unlocked door; the puppy pranced in like a diminutive hobby-horse, flushed a big lizard, and went into fits of excitement till the solitary cabin rang with his treble barking.
They watched him through the doorway, laughingly; then Gray looked at the claim notice stuck upright in the sand. Presently he walked to the edge of the coquina quarry and looked down into it.
Thousands of dollars' worth of the shell deposit lay already exposed. There were great strata of it; ledges, shelves, vast masses in every direction. The quarry had been worked very little, and that little had been accomplished stupidly. Either in[178] the rough, or merely as lumps of conglomerate for crushing, the coquina in sight alone was very, very valuable. There could be no doubt of that.
Also, he understood that the strata deposited there continued at least for half a mile to the westward, where his own bungalow marked its probable termination.