"I'm rather glad they got clear of us." "So am I.There was no chance, but I always try." "So shall I," he said--"whether there is a chance or not." She looked up quickly, reading his meaning.

Then she bent over the gun that she was breaking, extracted the shells, looped them, and returned the weapon to its holster.
Behind them her father and brother jeered at them for their failure, Gray being particularly offensive in ascribing their fiasco to bad riding and buck-fever.
A little later Shiela's horse almost unseated her, leaping aside and into the jungle as an enormous black snake coiled close in front.
"Don't shoot!" she cried out to Hamil, mastering her horse and forcing him past the big, handsome, harmless reptile; "nobody shoots black snakes or buzzards here.

Slip your gun back quickly or Gray will torment you." However, Gray had seen, and kept up a running fire of sarcastic comment which made Hamil laugh and Shiela indignant.
And so they rode along through the rich afternoon sunshine, now under the clustered pines, now across glades where wild doves sprang up into clattering flight displaying the four white feathers, or pretty little ground doves ran fearlessly between the horses' legs.
Here and there a crimson cardinal, crest lifted, sat singing deliciously on some green bough; now and then a summer tanager dropped like a live coal into the deeper jungle.

Great shiny blue, crestless jays flitted over the scrub; shy black and white and chestnut chewinks flirted into sight and out again among the heaps of dead brush; red-bellied woodpeckers, sticking to the tree trunks, turned their heads calmly; gray lizards, big, ugly red-headed lizards, swift slender lizards with blue tails raced across the dry leaves or up tree trunks, making even more fuss and clatter than the noisy cinnamon-tinted thrashers in the underbrush.
Every step into the unknown was a new happiness; there was no silence there for those who could hear, no solitude for those who could see.

And he was riding into it with a young companion who saw and heard and loved and understood it all.