of him struck me as equally unkempt and dingy--a youngish man, lean,
deeply bitten by the sun of the semi-tropics to a mahogany hue, and
unusually hairy.

I don't mind a brawny, hairy man, but the hair on Grue's arms and chest
was a rusty red, and like a chimpanzee's in texture, and sometimes a
wildly absurd idea possessed me that the man needed it when he went about
in the palm forests without his clothes.

But he was only a "poor white"--a "cracker" recruited from one of the
reefs near Pelican Light, where he lived alone by fishing and selling his
fish to the hotels at Heliatrope City. The sail-boat was his; he figured
as our official guide on this expedition--an expedition which already had
begun to worry me a great deal.

For it was, perhaps, the wildest goose chase and the most absurdly
hopeless enterprise ever undertaken in the interest of science by the
Bronx Park authorities.

Nothing is more dreaded by scientists than ridicule; and it was in spite
of this terror of ridicule that I summoned sufficient courage to organize
an exploring party and start out in search of something so extraordinary,
so hitherto unheard of, that I had not dared reveal to Kemper by letter
the object of my quest.

No, I did not care to commit myself to writing just yet; I had merely
sent Kemper a letter to join me on Sting-ray Key.

He telegraphed me from Tampa that he would join me at the rendezvous; and
I started directly from Bronx Park for Heliatrope City; arrived there in