the tidewater country near the sea to the Santee's sources high among the hills.
Day after day they threaded their shadowy labyrinth. Almayne, moody and preoccupied at first, grew more and more cheerful as mile after mile of their journey passed and still they saw no sign of an enemy. To Jolie this vast cane thicket with its teeming life was scarcely less wonderful than the forest had been; but she grew weary of its dimness, of its hushed, furtive noises, of its endless leagues of smooth straight stems hedging her in on either side, and of the green roof of cane foliage meeting overhead and shutting out the sun. She knew that the most dangerous stage of their journey would come when they left the canebrake amid the foothills; yet she was eager for that time to come.
It came at last. The brake was much narrower, the canes were of smaller girth, and the river had dwindled to a crystal-clear, swift-flowing creek. They turned aside from it at a point where a splendid beech wood came down to the edge of the stream; and for miles they rode through a noble forest where nothing save beeches grew, clothing every hill and valley—for they were now in the rolling lands of the upper country—casting so deep a shade that no undergrowth subsisted under them.
The stately beech forest merged into an even statelier one of oak, hickory, ash, walnut, and many other broad-leafed trees beneath which they saw herds of grazing deer and many flocks of turkeys, while in
