“She spoke of your own father?”

“No.  I do not even know his name.  We were pledged not to speak of it.  I fancied as I grew older that she was sorry—­”

The subject was obviously painful.

“And you’ve never been honestly contented since?” put in Mic-co quickly.

“Once.”  Carl spoke of Wherry.  “They were weeks of genuine hardship, those weeks at the farm, but it’s singular how frequently my mind goes back to them.”

“Ah!” said Mic-co with glowing eyes, “there is no salvation like work for the happiness of another.  That I know.”

So the quiet days filed by until Mic-co turned at last from the healing of the mind to the healing of the body.

“Let us test your endurance in the Seminole way,” he said one morning by the island camp fire where his Indian servants cooked the food for the lodge.  Beyond lay the palmetto wigwams of the Indian servants who worked in the island fields of corn and rice and sugar cane, made wild cassava into flour, hunted with Mic-co and rode betimes with the island exports into civilization by the roundabout road to the south which skirted the swamp.  Off to the west, in the curious chain of islands, lay the palmetto shelter of the horses.

Mic-co placed a live coal upon the wrist of his young guest and quietly watched.  There was no flinching.  The coal burned itself out upon the motionless wrist of a Spartan.

Thereafter they rode hard and hunted, day by day.  Carl worked in the fields with Mic-co and the Indians, tramped at sunset over miles of island path fringed with groves of bitter orange, disciplining his body to a new endurance.  A heavy sweat at the end in a closed tent of buckskin which opened upon the shore of a sheltered inland lake, hardened his aching muscles to iron.

Upon the great stone heating in the fire within the sweat-lodge an Indian lad poured water.  It rose in sweltering clouds of steam about the naked body of Mic-co’s guest, who at length plunged from the tent into the chill waters of the lake and swam vigorously across to towels and shelter.

Carl learned to pole a cypress canoe dexterously through miles of swamp tangled with grass and lilies, through shallows and deep pools darkened by hanging branches.  He learned to tan hides and to carry a deer upon his shoulders.  Nightly he plunged from the sweat-lodge into the lake and later slept the sleep of utter weariness under a deerskin cover.

So Mic-co disciplined the splendid body and brain of his guest to the strength and endurance of an Indian; but the quiet hours by the pool brought with them the subtler healing.

Carl grew browner and sturdier day by day.  His eyes were quieter.  There was less of arrogance too in the sensitive mouth and less of careless assertiveness in his manner.

So matters stood when Philip rode in by the southern trail with Sho-caw.

Now Philip had wisely waited for the inevitable readjustment, trusting entirely to Mic-co, but with the memory of Carl’s haggard face and haunted eyes, he was unprepared for the lean, tanned, wholly vigorous young man who sprang to meet him.