-as if anything this sweet-faced girl could say could possibly
injure it!

"All he wanted of you was to stay at Kastle Krags during the hunting
party, and be able to show the men where to hunt and fish. You won't
have to act as--as anybody's valet--and he says he'll pay you real
guide's wages, ten dollars a day."

"When would he want me to begin?"

"Right away, if you could--to-morrow. The guests won't be here for two
weeks, but there are a lot of things to do first. You see, my uncle came
here only a short time ago, and all the fishing-boats need overhauling,
and everything put in ship-shape. Then he thought you'd want some extra
time for looking around and locating the game and fish. The work would
be for three weeks, in all."

Three weeks! I did some fast figuring, and I found that twenty days, at
ten dollars a day, meant two hundred dollars. Could I afford to refuse
such an offer as this?

It is true that I had no particular love for many of the city sportsmen
that came to shoot turkey and to fish in the region of the Ochakee. The
reason was simply that "sportsmen," for them, was a misnomer: that they
had no conception of sport from its beginnings to its end, and that they
could only kill game like butchers. Then I didn't know that I would care
about being employed in such a capacity.

Yet two or three tremendous considerations stared me in the face. In the
first place, I was really in need of funds. I had not yet obtained any
of the higher scholastic degrees that would entitle me to decent pay at
the university--I was merely a post-graduate student, with the
complimentary title of "instructor." I had offered to spend my summer
collecting specimens for the university museum at a wage that barely
paid for my traveling expenses and supplies, wholly failing to consider
where I would get sufficient funds to continue my studies the following
year.

Scarcity of money--no one can feel it worse than a young man inflamed
with a passion for scientific research! There were a thousand things I
wanted to do, a thousand journeys into unknown lands that haunted my
dreams at night, but none of them were for the poor. The two hundred
dollars Grover Nealman would pay me would not go far, yet I simply
couldn't afford to pass it by. Of course I could continue my work for
my alma mater at the same time.

Yet while I thought of these things, I knew that I was only lying to
myself. They were subterfuges only, excuses to my own c