CHAPTER XIV
PALMETTOS OF THE ST. LUCIE
The cattle men, whose wealth is in range cattle,
roaming at will, take advantage of the dry
weather of winter to set the world afire. Hence
a soft, blue haze all about that makes the wide
spaces between trees misty and uncertain and
puts vague touches of romance on all distances.
By day a cloudy pillar shows where this fire has
got into thick, young growths of pines and is
towering heavenward in pitchy smoke. By night
the level distance is weird with flickering light,
and the wanderer is guided by a moving column
of flame as were the Israelites of old.
After these moving lines of fire have passed, the flame often lingers for days in stumps of the pine, eating away at the fat wood which is solid and green with resin. A chip off a dead stump of a Florida pine will burn at the touch of a match. All over the flatwoods are these stumps, often standing fifty feet high and a foot or two in diameter. The bark has fallen, leaving them to personate thin ghosts in the vivid light of moon-
