[Illustration:  “THE HARD, POINTED HEAD OF THE BIG TARPON TORE THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE FRAGILE CANOE”]

“Well, Neddy, what have you been doing now, and what are you going to do?  Last time I saw you a thousand-pound fish was dropping on your head.  Seems as if he hit me, too.”

“Going to make a camp for the two of us, feed us, and get us out of the wilderness.  That’s what I am going to do,” replied Ned.

“You’ll do it, all right; but what have you got to work with?”

“Pocket-knife and some matches.  First thing I’ll make a fire to dry you.  Then I’ll forage.  You see, Dick, we’ve got to stay right here until you get strong enough to travel.  I can make a palmetto shack big enough to keep the rain off in half a day.  The worst trouble will be fresh water, but I think I can fix that.  I know how to get things to eat.  I have picked up a couple of old cocoanuts, and I’ll bring them to you in an hour full of water.  Then to-morrow I will start early and find that old shack where we camped in the graveyard.  You remember that old kettle there?  Well, I’ll bring it here full of fresh water.  Then if you don’t get well pretty quick I’ll leave you plenty to eat and drink and find my way to the coast.  I can do it in a day, and have your old friend, who don’t believe we know a manatee from a tarpon, up here with his boat the next day sure.”

“Don’t do it, Neddy.  I’d be thinking of a hundred things happening to you, and the night would be pretty lonesome without even Tom.”

Ned started away from the river through a wooded swamp, and before he had gone a quarter of a mile struck a prairie on which several deer were feeding.  The animals seemed to know that he had no weapon, for they showed no alarm until he had walked some distance toward them.  There were a number of small ponds near him, and as Ned approached the nearest one a small alligator slipped from the bank into the water.  The boy had provided himself with a short, heavy pole, and he waded fearlessly in after the ’gator; but although the pond was not thirty feet across and he explored every foot of it, he could not find the reptile.  He finally came across an opening in the bank, in which he thrust his pole, when it was promptly seized by the alligator.  Ned tried to pull the reptile within reach, but when the head came out of the cave it was larger than he had looked for, and before he had made up his mind to tackle it the creature had let go of the pole and gone back in his cave.  Then the boy got earnest and determined to have that alligator if he had to crawl into the cave after him.  He sharpened a bit of branch that stuck out beside the big end of his pole like the barb of a harpoon, and again thrust it in the cave.  Soon he had the reptile fighting mad with his head out of the cave, when he pushed the pole into his open mouth, and catching the barb in the soft skin under the alligator’s jaw, just as Dick had done weeks