The flight in the Anclote to the swamp land for a glimpse of the famed Everglades and a possible sight of the Secret City of the Seminoles (an excursion which nearly ended with a fatality) began at seven o’clock in the morning. The only clue to the location of the mythical town was a vague reference to it in a little paper bound book, written by an old alligator and egret hunter, entitled “Thirty Years in the Everglades.” In this, the writer did not claim to have seen the fabled town, but he quoted old Billy Bowlegs—a well known modern Seminole—as authority for the statement that such a place existed.

According to the veteran hunter, the city should be due east of present St. Petersburgh, a town on the southern tip of Tampa Peninsula, and north of Lake Istokpoga; “two days’ travel,” as described by the Indian. This, in the swamps, meant about ten miles. Mapped on their charts, the two boys laid out a course east-south-east of their camp on the Key, and[246] estimated the distance at ninety-five miles.

With gasoline sufficient for a two hundred and fifty-mile flight, the aeroplane was over Tarpon Springs in fifteen minutes, and then, rising to nearly 1,000 feet, began its cross country flight. For nearly a half hour, fruit orchards and truck farms indicated civilization, and then the rough palmetto scrub and sparse pine lands began to tell of the wilderness. Already deer were plentiful. An hour after the start, the airship still high and the engine working perfectly, the myriad small lakes and creeks began to disappear in a lower swamp land.

In this, the dark green of cabbage and fan palmettoes and stunted pines, suddenly changed to a darker expanse of vegetation. Out of a prairie of tall swamp grass, rose oaks and taller pines draped with fantastic garlands of waving Spanish moss. Then this changed to a new and dense wilderness of tangled oaks, palmettoes and pines seemingly bound together with interminable bands of the melancholy moss.

Out of this silent chaos, reaching eastward as far as the eye could see, rose the tall, black spars of blasted oaks with eagles’ nests here and there, and always the ghostly moss.

“It’s as bad as flying at sea,” remarked Bob.[247] “You might come up out of the water, but a punch from one of those old snags, and it’s all off.”

At times, as the Anclote held her course east-south-east, the trees thinned and a glimpse of the morass beneath met the eye. Some of these openings revealed ponds and even lakes. But the water was no longer blue or silvery. It lay glistening black like broken coal. Sighting one of these buried lakes, Bob swept the machine lower to have a closer view. As the whirr of the propellers came echoing back with a hollow, drum-like sound, a flock of snow white herons rose from an island of rotting logs.

“See him?” exclaimed Tom.

“’Bout fifteen feet long,” answered Bob.

The shrill cries of the startled birds had aroused a monster alligator, sunning himself high on the logs. With hardly a sound, he slid backwards into the ebony-colored pool.

The herons, their crane-like legs trailing behind them, flapped their way eastward. Some miles ahead, Bob slowing up on another spiral mount, the snow white birds disappeared.

“Somethin’ theah,” suggested Tom. “Let’s have a look.”

The aeroplane had been in the air nearly two[248] hours. The retreat of the herons was something—the first sight of it was even startling. Here was another lake, but it was much larger—even a mile in diameter, and, by some strange freak of nature, of crystal clearness. A creek emptied into its sparkling waters and another led away southward through the wall of tangled, moss-draped palmettoes, grass and dead pines. About the little lake, there was an open shore of sand, so light in color as to be almost white, apparently packed into a firm grassless beach by the rising and falling lake.

“That’s something,” exclaimed Bob, attempting to relax his straining muscles. “We could land on that if it was restin’ time.”

But they had not yet covered their ninety-five miles. Tom carefully keeping note of the flying minutes and the anemometer for the speed, had just calculated that they advanced in one hour and fifty-five minutes nearly seventy-six miles, for, part of the time, the more and more confident Bob had speeded up to the limit, once reaching a rate of forty-three miles an hour.

“We’ll go ahead twenty miles,” suggested Bob. “If nothing turns up, we’ll come back[249] this far, stop for a few hours’ rest and lunch, and then call it quits, and hike home.”

“What we’ve seen already is worth the trip,” added Tom enthusiastically.

Old Billy Bowlegs must have had a poor sense of location. Twelve minutes later, the Anclote, soaring not over three hundred feet above the gray and black swamp, passed, without a sign to indicate it, a deep, clean-cut opening in the trees. It was almost like a well. At the bottom of it, on a treeless island, seven or eight ruined sheds caught the quick eyes of the young aviators. There was only time to note this, to detect human beings here and there, and to see that a wide, black canal surrounded the habited retreat, and the darting aeroplane closed the view.

“There—” began Tom, striving to turn for another look.

“Here—” exclaimed Bob, in turn.

Within a half mile of the tree encircled swamp island, rose a treeless mound. Bob intuitively slowed down the airship with a circling swing. As the peculiar elevation swept under the machine, it could be seen that the top of it was green with corn and beds of vegetables.

“That’s their garden,” shouted Tom.[250] “There must be a way to get to it. There is—see the canal?”

Both boys instantly made out two Indians just landing from a canoe or pirogue in the swamp at the foot of the hill. Behind them, a dark colored creek or canal disappeared within the mossy oaks. The tilted aeroplane had come about in her course and was circling over the flat-topped hill like a lazy bird.

“We can’t land there,” announced Bob. “The ground is too soft to give us a starting run.”

“We’ve got to,” replied Tom, with determination. “It’s no good just seen’ it. I want to know. I’ve got to know,” he added, “if I’m goin’ to write about it.”

Bob knit his brows. “We can’t stop,” he repeated. Then he hesitated. “Are you afraid to meet those people alone?”

“I don’t know why I should be,” answered Tom. “They look like farmahs. Scalpin’ days are ovah, anyway, I reckon.”

“Then,” added Bob quickly, “take the camera—you’ve got the revolver—and I’ll make a sweep down near the ground. drop off. In an hour, I’ll come back and pick you up—the same way.”
 
“It’ll be all right, will it?” exclaimed Tom. “I mean, it won’t hurt the machine?”

“I’ll have something to help you when I come back,” answered Bob. “Just use your nerve. It’ll be all right. It’s your ‘Secret City,’ or I’d do it. We can’t both do it.”

“Come back?” exclaimed Tom. “Where are you goin’?”

“Back to Sand Beach Lake,” announced Bob. “It’ll give me a rest, and give you time to investigate. But be ready—in an hour.”

“drop her down,” said Tom curtly looking at his watch. “It’s twenty-six minutes after nine o’clock.”

In another moment, Tom Allen, his camera still oscillating from his drop from the aeroplane as it darted low over the Indian cornfield, was watching the Anclote’s swift rise and flight over the trees to the northwest.

Bob reached the lake, selected the widest and best beach and made an easy landing. For a few minutes, he exercised his benu............