CHAPTER XIV.
STRATEGY An hour or two later that afternoon Wayward and Constance Palliser, Gussie Vetchen, and Livingston Cuyp gazed with variously mingled sentiments upon the torpid saurians belonging to one Alligator Joe in an enclosure rather remote from the hotel.
Vetchen bestowed largess upon the small, freckled boy attendant; and his distinguished disapproval upon the largest lady-crocodile which, with interlocked but grinning jaws, slumbered under a vertical sun in monochromatic majesty.
"One perpetual and gigantic simper," he said, disgusted.
"Rather undignified for a thing as big as that to lay eggs like a hen," observed Cuyp, not intending to be funny.
Wayward and Miss Palliser had wandered off together to inspect the pumps.

Vetchen, always inquisitive, had discovered a coy manatee in one tank, and was all for poking it with his walking-stick until he saw its preposterous countenance emerge from the water.
"Great heavens," he faltered, "it looks like a Dutch ancestor of Cuyp's!" Cuyp, intensely annoyed, glanced at his watch.
"Where the mischief did Miss Suydam and Malcourt go ?" he asked Wayward.
"I say, Miss Palliser, you don't want to wait here any longer, do you ?" "They're somewhere in the labyrinth," said Wayward.

"Their chair went that way, didn't it, boy ?" "Yeth, thir," said the small and freckled attendant.
So the party descended the wooden incline to where their sleepy black chairmen lay on the grass, waiting; and presently the two double chairs wheeled away toward that amusing maze of jungle pathways cut through the impenetrable hammock, and popularly known as the labyrinth.
But Miss Suydam and Mr.Malcourt were not in the labyrinth.

At that very moment they were slowly strolling along the eastern dunes where the vast solitude of sky and sea seemed to depress even the single white-headed eagle standing on the wet beach, head and tail adroop, motionless, fish-gorged.

No other living thing was in sight except the slim, blue dragon-flies, ceaselessly darting among the beach-grapes; nothing else stirred except those two figures on the dunes, moving slowly, heads bent as though considering the advisability of every step in the breaking sands.