pping old alligator that I thought was going to bite me in two,
without being scolded by everybody on board for recklessness? First
there was Dad, and he uses pretty powerful language when he gets
real earnest, then Captain Hull gave it to me like a Dutch uncle,
and even Molly lectured me and squeezed out a few tears. I told Dad
it wasn't half as bad as your jumping in the way of that panther,
but he said that was altogether a different thing and had some sense
in it."

CHAPTER XXV

IN FLORIDA BAY

After the _Irene_ had sailed twenty miles down the coast and was
about opposite East Cape (Sable) Captain Hull asked for his orders.

"Isn't Madeira Hammock on the coast, about thirty miles from here?"
inquired Ned.

"Yes, but you will have to go seventy to get there. You've got to go
way round by the keys."

"Isn't there water enough for the _Irene_ along the coast?"

"Isn't enough to float the skiff. You can go about ten miles. After
that there's an inch of water and I reckon a mile of blue, soft,
sticky mud. I've been a few feet down in it and the farther I went
the softer and stickier it got."

"Suppose we go the ten miles you talk about what will we find?"

"Tarpon, sharks, porpoises, lots of fish, birds and enough sawfish
to make a picket fence of their saws all around the coast."

"That's us, Captain," said Ned.

And the _Irene's_ mud hook went to the bottom that night in eight
feet of water off Joe Kemp's Key.

In the shoal water over the broad banks which lay to the south and
east of the _Irene_ the bayonet fins of many tarpon rose high above
the surface as the fish beneath them pursued their prey. Often the
two fins shown by a wandering shark swept swiftly across a bank, or
three big reddish fins moving in a straight line slowly behind a
great, swaying, four-foot weapon marked the course of a fifteen-foot
sawfish. There was water to float the power boat in the channels
between the banks, and families of porpoises or dolphins were always
ready to serve as pilots and point the path through these
labyrinthine waterways. A school of porpoises, rolling in the water
and leaping in the air, passed the motor boat as if they had been
telephoned for in the greatest haste. Two minutes later, a quarter
of a mile away, a great splashing could be seen and huge bodies
hurled in the air, which seemed to be filled with flying fragments.

The power boat, with Molly at the wheel, started for the fray at its
b