IV
When Miss Cassillis heard the gun, it sounded very far away. But it irritated as well as scared her. She pushed the canoe energetically through a screen of foliage overhanging the bank of the lagoon, it being merely her immediate instinct to hide herself.
To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered herself in a narrow, deep lead, which had been entirely concealed by the leaves, and which wound away through an illimitable vista of reeds, widening as she paddled forward, until it seemed like a glassy river bordered by live-oak, water-oak, pine, and palmetto, curving out into a flat and endless land of forests.
Here was liberty at last! No pursuit need now be feared, for the entrance to this paradise[29] which she had forced by a chance impulse could never be suspected by parent or fiancé.
A little breeze blew her hair and loosened it; silently her paddle dipped, swept astern in a swirl of bubbles, flashed dripping, and dipped again.
Ahead of her a snake-bird slipped from a dead branch into the water; a cormorant perched on the whitened skeleton of a mango, made hideous efforts to swallow a mullet before her approach disorganized his manœuvres.
So silently the canoe stole along that the fat alligators, dozing in the saw-grass, dozed on until she stirred them purposely with a low tap of her paddle against the thwarts; then they rose, great lumbering bodies propped high on squatty legs, waddled swiftly to the bank's edge, and slid headlong into the water.
Everywhere dragon-flies glittered over the saw-grass; wild ducks with golden eyes and heads like balls of brown plush swam leisurely out of the way; a few mallard, pretending to be frightened, splashed and clattered into flight, the sunlight jewelling the emerald heads of the drakes.
"Wonderful, wonderful," her heart was singing to itself, while her enchanted eyes missed nothing—neither the feebly flying and strangely[30] shaped, velvety black butterflies, the narrow wings of which were striped with violent yellow; nor the metallic blue and crestless jays that sat on saplings, watching her; nor the pelicans fishing with nature's orange and iridescent net in the shallows; nor the tall, slate-blue birds that marched in dignified retreat through the sedge, picking up their stilt-like legs with the precision of German foot-soldiers on parade.