before, hauled him out of the cave and dragged him out on the bank.  When a few yards from the pond the reptile broke loose from the barb and started back for the pond.  Ned was after him like a tiger and struck two or three smashing blows on the creature’s head with his pole, and then, as the reptile neared the water, threw himself on its back and seizing its jaws held them together while he turned the brute on its back.  At first the alligator lashed out with its tail, but soon became quiet; and then Ned got out his knife and severed the spine of the reptile.

The water of the pond was so nearly fresh that its taste was only slightly sweetish, and after Ned had drank all he could hold he filled his two cocoanuts for Dick.  On his way to camp he hunted up a young palmetto for the bud or cabbage which grew in the top of the tree.  The sharp edges of the great, tough leaves tore his flesh as he climbed through them, and it was only after more than an hour of hard work with his knife that he secured the cabbage he was working for.  By this time the water he had drunk had oozed out through his pores.  He was so parched with thirst that he took a long walk back to the pond and filled up again.

That night Dick and Ned had broiled alligator steak and palmetto cabbage for supper.  Both suffered so much for want of water that Ned started out at daylight to find the old abandoned plantation.  Dick was pale and his smile so wan that Ned’s heart was sore at leaving him.  He was too earnest to think of trivial things, and he sloshed through the swamp without thought of the swaying heads of little speckle-bellies in his path, or the great, ugly cotton-mouth moccasins that moved slowly aside as he wallowed through their lairs.  He stopped long enough on the border of the prairie to find a club, with which he fiercely pounded to death a rattlesnake, upon whose coils he had nearly stepped when the locust-like warning found its way to his consciousness.

After about three miles of tramping, during which he waded waist-deep across two sloughs, the prairie opened upon familiar ground, and Ned knew that he was opposite the plantation he sought.  In the decaying building he found an old bucket that would hold three or four gallons, and a couple of quart cans in which water could be boiled.  From a tamarind tree he gathered the half-dried fruit with its sweet acidity, and in the old garden he discovered a few stalks of sugar-cane.  He picked up a rusty fish-hook and from an old net got a quantity of string.  Then filling his bucket with rain water, he started back to Dick and the camp.  The journey was a hard one, and though he refused to drink a drop of the water, half of it was lost on the way.  The weight of it pressed him down in the mire of the sloughs until he sank to the armpits as he held the heavy bucket on his head.  Dick laughed aloud with joy, even if it was a bit hysterical, when Ned got home to camp.

“Been lonesome?” asked Ned after Dick had drank a quart of water and looked as if he wanted a gallon more.