All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 39: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ONE GIFT. beat oddly up into the still sunshine. So the bird would have acted had it seen a man. No, it must have been surprised at some gluttonous repast by a roaming alli- gator. Almost a mile away there was an odd movement at the edge of a saw-grass pond. There was a smile in his eyes as he made out the nature of the mevement. Two sandhill cranes were dancing for each other there—leaping, pirouetting, casting sticks into the air and catching them again. Sun and shadow, grass and woods, a soli- tude of earth and sky. But he suddenly cast his head upward and breathed deeply through expanded nos- trils. There again was that taint in the air he had noticed in the night—extremely faint, yet acrid, like nothing native to this place. It was a scent that had often filled his people with the same sort of distrust and desire to get away. The deer and the other wild creatures knew when that scent reached them—the scent of burning gaso- lme—the scent of a fire-wagon, an auto- mobile. The scent came. It was gone. As far as he could see, the grass stood still. It was an hour of the day when the breeze—when there was any breeze at all— was apt to be fitful, changing its direction at almost every puff. But his knowledge of the lay of the land told him about where it was that he would find ‘these interlopers —find their automobile, at any rate. Per- haps they had left their machine. He would do well to be on the lookout for them. He started across the grassy levels, swiftly, and yet ever with this watchfulness mn his mind. The watchfulness increased, the further he went, many signs warning nim of danger. He came to a place where the caracara nad been frightened, and saw that it was as he had guessed. The bird had been at work on the remnants of a panther’s kill of the night before—a tumbled mass of fur and bones that had once been a fawn. A nalf-grown alligator raised its head and hissed like a goose in defense of the prize as Blue Otter passed. But he gave no heed. Even the dancing cranes failed to reassure him. The birds were notoriously 29 contemptuous of man, or notoriously over- trustful, in certain of their moods. Blue Otter had seen signs where a flock of turkeys had been feeding, and then had started to run, swiftly. Quail were scat- tered as if recently frightened. Thrice now he had cut the trail of wildly-jumping deer. and he knew that it was no mere panther, ner yet the scent of that distant fire-wagon of the white men, that could have caused all this panic in the neighborhood, There were white men near. Yet these white men made neither smoke nor noise. Had they been white men hunting in the usual way—hunting the girl especially— they would have talked loud, fired their guns, made a smoke that could have been seen twenty or thirty miles. Were these white men hunting the girl? And, if so, why should they be stalking ther in silence? He had covered perhaps a dozen miles when he stopped, breathless. He had quartered often, like a trained bird-dog, in quest of further sign. But it was a diffi- cult country for trailing—ponds with hard sand bottoms, wide stretches of almost level limerock, these as incapable of holding a trail as a granite street; acres of scub-pal- metto. that would scarcely have registered the passage of an elephant. Yet here was the thing he had been leoking for. In a hollow of rock there was a drift of sand; in the drift of sand there was half of the imprint of a foot; the foot had been shod with the sort of shoe that no wilder- ness dweller would ever use, pointed and narrow, and yet the footprint of a man. So much was merely incidental. The thing that held Blue Otter breath- less was the fact that this man had been headed for the camp on the edge of the Everglades the night before, that he might be there now. — 3 “While I was making medicine,” said Blue Otter to himself, “I was thinking only of that, and of the girl I was making it for.” He glanced swiftly away. A hundred vards ahead he picked up the trail again where not one man but two had crossed a carpet of grass. He saw now that they COmiIclooOo SS C©