Free Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen

which also brought word of her recent marriage to old Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was he by her abandonment (he had somehow assumed that his first love would await him forever) that he scarcely noticed her mention of the list.
    In the next years, he made a hard sparse living as a hunting and fishing guide and commercial fisherman, and most of the men accepted him again as talk of his list died down. His only trouble came about through his association with the Hardens, whose side he would take in a dangerous feud with the Bay people which had ended in the murder of two Harden sons.

    In 1947, when the Ten Thousand Islands were appropriated for the national park, Lucius moved north to Caxambas. There he found a warm welcome from the women and children of the Daniels-Jenkins clan, whom his father had always spoken of as “my backdoor family.” A decade later he returned to the University of Florida at Gainesville, where he accepted a teaching post as an assistant professor while completing his
History of Southwest Florida
.In his class was Sally Brown of Everglade, a lovely young woman with long flaxen hair bound loosely with rawhide at her pretty nape who had recently separated from Lee Harden’s son Whidden and returned to college.
    Sally made herself wonderfully useful in his work, not only as a researcher but as a source of information on the Island families. Of Everglades pioneer stock on both sides—he had almost forgotten that she was Speck Daniels’s daughter—she had repudiated what she perceived as the racism and redneck ignorance in her community which had made life so dangerous for her husband’s family. But as she ruefully confessed, her fierce tirades in defense of the Hardens had reawakened a lot of the mean gossip which that family imagined had been put to rest, until finally the Hardens themselves rebuked Whidden for not bringing his wife’s tongue under control. For this reason—and others—the marriage had come apart. “My fault,” Sally admitted, making no excuses.
    Sally Brown was passionate, intemperate, and very angry (he suspected) for more primal reasons than those that she invoked. Though never certain how much he could trust her version of local events, he liked her because she was generous and wry and because her high opinion of “Mister Colonel” Watson, learned from the Hardens, had made her delightfully affectionate right from the start. Indeed, he felt affectionate himself, and had longed to kiss her from the first day she came by his rooms to say hello.
    Lucius had been careful not to flirt with Sally, even in an avuncular sort of way. A courtly and old-fashioned man, he thought his need unnatural, considering their discrepancy in age. He also condemned it as immoral, since he was close to the Harden family and had been a sort of uncle to her husband, back in the early days at Lost Man’s River. Besides, he was unhappily aware of his emotional limitations, which all his life had made him choose loneliness over commitment, no matter how fearful he might be that his one life on earth would pass him by. One night in a bar, he had confessed to the attraction, denouncing himself as “a dirty and villainous old man.” Sally, who had long since known he was attracted, informed him that his whole attitude was ridiculous.
    Meanwhile, his
History
had been well received by the university press, which encouraged him to proceed at once with his biography of E. J. Watson. The proposal specified, however, that a pseudonym be used for both books, since the subject had already been cited in the
History
as a notable pioneer in Florida agriculture, and the editors questioned the suitability of extolling the author’s father in both volumes, all the more so when this parent—as they not so subtly reminded him—was indelibly associated in the public mind with something else. Thinking it dishonorable to hide behind another name, he withdrew