The lone passenger smoked idly and watched the gaunt cattle staggering, penned in the flat, dead heat of the foredeck.  Tedge cursed him, too, under his breath.  Milt Rogers had asked to make the coast run from Beaumont on Tedge’s boat.  Tedge remembered what Rogers said—­he was going to see a girl who lived up Bayou Boeuf above Tedge’s destination.  Tedge remembered that girl—­a Cajan girl whom he once heard singing in the floating gardens while Tedge was battling and cursing to pass the blockade.

He hated her for loving the lilies, and the man for loving her.  He burst out again with his volcanic fury at the green and purple horde.

“They’re a fine sight to see,” mused the other, “after a man’s eyes been burned out ridin’ the dry range; no rain in nine months up there—­nothin’ green or pretty in——­”

“Pretty!” Tedge seemed to menace with his little shifty eyes.  “I wish all them lilies had one neck and I could twist it!  Jest one head, and me stompin’ it!  Yeh!—­and all the damned flowers in the world with it!  Yeh!  And me watchin’ ’em die!”

The man from the dry lands smoked idly under the awning.  His serenity evoked all the savagery of Tedge’s feud with the lilies.  Pretty!  A man who dealt with cows seeing beauty in anything!  Well, the girl did it—­that swamp angel this Rogers was going to visit.  That Aurelie Frenet who sang in the flower-starred river—­that was it!  Tedge glowered on the Texan—­he hated him, too, because this loveliness gave him peace, while the master of the Marie Louise must fume about his wheelhouse, a perspiring madman.

It took an hour for the Marie even to retreat and find steerage-way easterly off across a shallow lake, mirroring the marsh shores in the sunset.  Across it the bayou boat wheezed and thumped drearily, drowning the bellowing of the dying steers.  Once the deckhand stirred and pointed.

“Lilies, Cap’n—­pourin’ from all the swamps, and dead ahead there now!”

Scowling, Tedge held to the starboard.  Yes, there they were—­a phalanx of flowers in the dusk.  He broke into wild curses at them, his boat, the staggering cattle.

“I’ll drive to the open gulf to get rid of ’em!  Outside, to sea!  Yeh!  Stranger, yeh’ll see salt water, and lilies drownin’ in it!  I’ll show yeh ’em dead and dried on the sands like dead men’s dried bones!  Yeh’ll see yer pretty flowers a-dyin’!”

The lone cowman ignored the sneer.  “You better get the animals to feed and water.  Another mornin’ of heat and crowdin’—­”

“Let ’em rot!  Yer pretty flowers done it—­pretty flowers—­spit o’ hell!  I knowed ’em—­I fought ’em—­I’ll fight ’em to the death of ’em!”

His little red-rimmed eyes hardly veiled his contempt for Milt Rogers.  A cowman, sailing this dusky purple bay to see a girl!  A girl who sang in the lily drift—­a-sailing on this dirty, reeking bumboat, with cattle dying jammed in the pens!  Suddenly Tedge realized a vast malevolent pleasure—­he couldn’t hope to gain from his perishing cargo; and he began to gloat at the agony spread below his wheelhouse window, and the cattleman’s futile pity for them.