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Black Caesar's Clan : A Florida Mystery Story

by Albert Payson Terhune · English · Gutenberg #4789 · 374,945 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Black Caesar's Clan : A Florida Mystery Story

Author: Albert Payson Terhune


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4789]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4789

Credits: Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACK CAESAR'S CLAN : A FLORIDA MYSTERY STORY ***




Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer









Black Caesar's Clan


by

Albert Payson Terhune






  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, MOST GRATEFULLY
  TO MY FRIEND
  JOHN E. PICKETT
  EDITOR OF
  "THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN"



CONTENTS

     I  THE HIDDEN PATH
    II  THE MAN IN THE DARK
   III  THE MOCKING BIRD
    IV  THE STRANGER FROM NOWHERE
     V  TRAPS AND TRAPPER
    VI  IN THE DAY OF BATTLE
   VII  SECRETS
  VIII  THE SIEGE
    IX  THE FIGURE IN WHITE
     X  THE GHOST TREE




FOREWORD


A wiggling, brainless, slimy atom began it.  He and trillions
of his kind.  He was the Coral Worm ("Anthozoa," if you prefer).

He and his tribe lived and died on the sea-bottom, successive
generations piling higher on the skeletons and lifework--or
the life-loafing, for they were lazy atoms--of those that went
before.  At last the coral reef crawled upward until in
uncharted waters it was tall enough to smash a wooden
ship-keel.

Then, above the surface of the waves it nosed its way, grayish
white, whalebacked.  From a hundred miles distant floated a
cigar-shaped mangrove-bud, bobbing vertically, through the
ocean, until it chanced to touch the new-risen coral reef.
The mangrove, alone of all trees, will sprout and grow in salt
water.  The mangrove's trunk, alone of all trunks, is
impervious to the corrosive action of the sea.

At once the bud set to work.  It drove an anchor-root into the
reef, then other roots and still others.  It shot up to the
height of a foot or two, and thence sent thick red-brown roots
straight downward into the coral again.

And so on, until it had formed a tangled root-fence for many
yards alongshore.  After which, its work being done, the
mangrove proceeded to grow upward into a big and glossy-leaved
shade-tree, making buds for further fences.

Meanwhile, every particle of floating seaweed, every dead fish
or animal, all vegetation, etc., which chanced to wash into
that fence-tangle, stayed there.  It is easier for matter, as
well as for man, to get entangled in mangrove roots than to
get out again.

The sun and the rain did their work on this decaying stuff.
Thus, soil was formed, atop the coral and in the hollows
scooped out of its surface by wind or tide.

Presently, a coconut, hurled from its stem in the Bahamas or
in Cuba, by a hurricane, set its palmleaf sail-sprout and was
gale-driven across the intervening seas, floating ashore on
the new-risen land.  There it sprouted.  Birds, winds, waves,
brought germs of other trees.  The subtropical island was
complete.

Island, key, reef--reef, key, island--with the intervening
gaps of azure-emerald water, bridged, bit by bit, by the
coral,--to-day a sea-surface, to-morrow a gray-white reef,
next day a mangrove hedge, and the next an expanse of
spectacular verdure and glistening gray-white sand.

So Florida was born.

So, at least, its southern portion was born, and is still in
daily process of birth.  And, according to Agassiz and many
another, the entire Peninsula may have arisen in this fashion,
from the green-blue sea.

Dredge and shovel are laboring hard to guide or check the
endless undersea coral growth before bay and channel and
lagoon shall all be dry land.  The wormlike, lazy,
fast-multiplying Anthozoa is fighting passively but with
terrific power, to set at naught all man's might and wit.

In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a
wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter
tourists throng by the hundred thousand.  In time, too, these
sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny
peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of
wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida
is a Career, not a Resort.

As in every land which has grown swiftly and along different
lines from the rest of the country, there still are mystery
and romance and thrills to be found lurking among the keys and
back of the mangrove-swamps and along the mystic reaches of
sunset shoreline.

With awkward and inexpert touch, my story seeks to set forth
some of these.

Understand, please, that this book is rank melodrama.  It has
scant literary quality.  It is not planned to edify.  Its only
mission is to entertain you and,--if you belong to the
action-loving majority, to give you an occasional thrill.

Perhaps you will like it.  Perhaps you will not.  But I do not
think you will go to sleep over it.  There are worse
recommendations than that for any book.

                    ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE.

"Sunnybank,"
  Pompton Lakes,
    New Jersey.





BLACK CAESAR'S CLAN




CHAPTER I

THE HIDDEN PATH


Overhead sang the steady trade wind, tempering the golden
sunshine's heat.  To eastward, under an incredibly blue sky,
stretched the more incredibly multi-hued waters of Biscayne
Bay, the snow-white wonder-city of Miami dreaming on its
shores.

Dividing the residence and business part of the city from the
giant hotels, Flagler Avenue split the mass of buildings, from
back-country to bay.  To its westward side spread the shaded
expanse of Royal Palm Park, with its deep-shaded short lane of
Australian pines, its rustling palm trees, its white church
and its frond-flecked vistas of grass.

Here, scarce a quarter-century ago, a sandspit had broiled
beneath an untempered sun.  Shadeless, grassless, it had been
an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for
mosquitoes.  Then had come the hand of man.  First, the Royal
Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of
nothingness.  Then other caravansaries.  Palm and pine and
vivid lawn-grass had followed.  The mosquitoes had fled far
back to the mangrove swamps.  And a rarely beautiful White
City had sprung up.

It was Sunday morning.  From the park's bandstand, William J.
Bryan was preaching to his open-air Sunday School class of
tourists, two thousand strong.  Around the bandstand the
audience stood or sat in rapt interest.

The Australian-pine lane, to the rear, was lined with all
manner of automobiles, from limousine to battered flivver.
The cars' occupants listened as best they could--through
the whirr of sea-planes and the soft hum of Sabbath traffic
and the dry slither of a myriad grating palm-fronds in the
trade-wind's wake--to the preacher's words.

The space of shaded grass, between lane and hotel-grounds and
bandstand, was starred by white-clad children, and by men who
sprawled drowsily upon the springy turf, their straw hats
tilted above their eyes.  The time was mid-February.  The
thermometers on the Royal Palm veranda registered
seventy-three.  No rain had fallen in weeks to mar the
weather's perfection.

"Scientists are spending $5,000,000 to send an expedition into
Africa in search of the 'missing-link'!" the orator was
thundering.  "It would be better for them to spend all or part
of that money, in seeking closer connection with their
Heavenly Father, than with the Brutes!"

A buzz of approval swept the listeners.  That same buzz came
irritatingly to the ears of a none-too-sprucely dressed young
man who lay, with eyes shut, under the shifting shade of a
giant palm, a hundred yards away.  He had not caught the
phrase which inspired the applause--thanks to the confusion of
street sounds and the multiple dry rattle of the palm-fronds
and the whirring passage of a sea-plane which circled above
park and bay.  But the buzz aroused him.

He had not been asleep.  Prone on his back, hat pulled over
his upper face, he had been lying motionless there, for the
best part of an hour.  Now, stretching, he got to his feet in
leisurely fashion, brushed perfunctorily at his rumpled
clothes, and turned his steps toward the double line of plumy
Australian pines which bordered the lane between hotel grounds
and avenue.

Only once did he hesitate in his slouching progress.  That was
when he chanced to come alongside one of the cars, in the long
rank, drawn up in the shade.  The machine's front seat was
occupied by a giant of a man, all in white silk, a man of
middle age, blonde and bearded, a man who, but for his modern
costume, might well have posed as a Norse Viking.

The splendid breadth of shoulder and depth of chest caught the
wanderer's glance and won his grudging approval.  Thence, his
elaborately careless gaze shifted to the car's rear seat where
sat a girl.  He noted she was small and dainty and tanned and
dressed in white sport-clothes.  Also, that one of her arms
was passed around the shoulder of a big young gold-and-white
collie dog,--a dog that fidgeted uneasily and paid scant heed
to the restraining hand and caressing voice of his mistress.

As the shabby man paused momentarily to scan the car's three
occupants, the girl happened to look toward him.  Her look was
brief and impersonal.  Yet, for the merest instant, her eyes
met his.  And their glances held each other with a momentary
intentness.  Then the girl turned again toward the restless
dog, seeking to quiet him.  And the man passed on.

Moving with aimless slowness--one is not long in Southern
Florida without acquiring a leisurely gait the lounger left
the park and strolled up Thirteenth Avenue, towards the bridge
which spans the Miami River and forms a link between the more
thickly settled part of the town and its southerly suburbs.

As he crossed the bridge, a car passed him, moving rapidly
eastward, and leaving a choky trail of dust.  He had bare time
to see it was driven by the Norse giant, and that the girl had
moved to the front seat beside the driver.  The collie
(fastened by a cord running through his collar from one side
of the tonneau to the other) lay fidgetingly on the rear seat.

For miles the man plodded on, under the wind-tempered
sunshine.  Passing Brickell Avenue and then the last of the
city, he continued,--now on the road, now going
cross-country,--until he came out on a patch of broken beach,
with a background of jungle-like forest.

The sun had gone beyond the meridian mark during his ramble
southward, and the afternoon was hurrying by.  For the way was
long, though he had tramped steadily.

As he reached the bit of sandy foreshore, he paused for the
first time since stopping to survey the car.  An unpainted
rowboat was drawn up on the beach.  Half way between it and
the tangle of woodland behind, was a man clad only in
undershirt and dirty duck trousers.  He was yanking along by
the scruff of the neck a protesting and evidently angry
collie.

The man was big and rugged.  Weather and sea had bronzed him
to the hue of an Arab.  Apparently, he had sighted the dog,
and had run his boat ashore to capture the stray animal.  He
handled his prize none too gently, and his management was
calling forth all the collie's resentment.  But as the man had
had the wit to seize the dog by the scruff of the neck and to
keep himself out of the reach of the luckless creature's
vainly snapping jaws, these protests went for nothing.

Within thirty feet of the boat, the dog braced himself for a
new effort to tear free.  The man, in anger, planted a
vigorous kick against the collie's furry side.  As his foot
was bare, the kick lost much of its potential power to injure.
Yet it had the effect of rousing to sudden indignation the
dusty youth who had stopped on his tramp from Miami to watch
the scene.

"Whose dog is that?" he demanded, striding forward, from the
shade, and approaching the struggling pair.

"Who the blue blazes are you?" countered the barefoot man, his
eyes running contemptuously over the shabby and slight-built
figure.

"My name is Brice," said the other.  "Gavin Brice.  Not that
it matters.  And now, perhaps you'll answer my question.
Whose dog is that?"

"Mine," returned the barefoot man, renewing his effort to drag
the collie toward the boat.

"If he's yours," said Brice, pleasantly, "stop hauling him
along and let him loose.  He'll follow you, without all that
hustling.  A good collie will always follow, his master,
anywhere."

"When I'm honin' for your jabber," retorted the other, "I'll
come a-askin' for it."

He drew back his foot once more, for a kick.  But, with a lazy
competence, Brice moved forward and gave him a light push,
sidewise, on the shoulder.  There was science and a rare
knowledge of leverage in the mild gesture.  When a man is
kicking, he is on only one foot.  And, the right sort of
oblique push will not only throw him off his balance, but in
such a direction that his second foot cannot come to earth in
position to help him restore that balance.

Under the skillfully gentle impact of Brice's shove, the man
let go of the snarling collie and hopped insanely for a second
or so, with arms outflung.  Then he sat down ungracefully on
the sand.

Scarce had he touched ground when he was up.

But the moment had sufficed for the collie to go free.
Instead of running off, the dog moved over to Brice, thrust
his cool muzzle into the man's hand, and, with wagging tail,
looked up lovingly at him.

A collie has brains beyond most dogs.  And this collie
recognized that the pleasant-voiced, indolent-looking stranger
had just rescued him from a captor who had been treating him
abominably.  Wherefore, in gratitude and dawning adoration, he
came to pay his respects.

Brice patted the silken head so confidingly upraised to him.
He knew dogs.  Especially, he knew collies.  And he was hot
with indignation at the needlessly brutal treatment just
accorded this splendid beast.

But he had scant time for emotions of any kind.  The beach
comber had regained his feet, and in the same motion had lost
his self-control.  Head lowered, fists swinging, he came
charging down upon the stripling who had the audacity to upset
him.

Brice did not await his onset.  Slipping lithely to one side
he avoided the bull-rush, all the time talking in the same
pleasantly modulated drawl.

"I saw this dog, earlier in the day," said he, "in a car, with
some people.  They drove this way.  The dog must have chewed
his cord and then jumped or fallen out, and strayed here.  You
saw him, from the water, and tried to steal him.  Next to a
vivisectionist, the filthiest man God ever made is the man who
kicks a dog.  It's lucky--"

He got no further.  Twice, during his short speech, he had
had to twist, with amazing speed, out of the way of
profanity-accompanied rushes.  Now, pressed too close for
comfort, he halted, ducked a violent left swing, and ran from
under the flailing right arm of his assailant.

Then, darting back for fully twenty-five feet, he cried out,
gayly:

"I won't buy him from you.  But I'll fight you for him, if you
like."

As he spoke, he drew from his pocket a battered and
old-fashioned gold watch.  Laying it on the sand, he went on:

"How does this strike you as a sporting offer?  Winner to take
both dog and watch?  How about it?"

The other had halted in an incipient charge to take note of
the odd proposition.  He blinked at the flash of the watch's
battered gold case in the sunshine.  For the first time, he
seemed a trifle irresolute.  This eel-like antagonist, with
such eccentric ideas as to sport, was something outside the
beach-comber's experience.  Puzzled, he stood scowling.

"How about it?" queried Brice.  "I hope you'll refuse.  I'd
rather be kicked, any day, than have to fight.  But--well, I
wouldn't rather see a good dog kicked.  Still, if you're
content with what you've got, we'll call it a day.  I'll take
the dog and be moving on."

The barefoot man's bewilderment was once more merging into
wrath, at the amused superiority in Brice's words and
demeanor.  He glowered appraisingly at the intruder.  He saw
Brice was a half-head shorter than himself and at least thirty
pounds lighter.  Nor did Brice's figure betray any special
muscular development.  Apparently, there could be but one
outcome to such a battle.

The man's fists clenched, afresh.  His big muscles tightened.
Brice saw the menace and spoke again.

"It's only fair to warn you," said he, gently, "that I shall
thrash you worse than ever you've been thrashed before in all
your down-at-heel life.  When I was a boy, I saw George Siler
beat up five men who tackled him.  Siler wasn't a big man.
But he had made a life-study of leverage.  And it served him
better than if he'd toted a machine gun.  I studied under him.
And then, a bit, under a jui-jutsu man.  You'll have less
chance against me than that poor collie had against you.  I
only mention it as a friendly warning.  Best let things rest
as they are.  Come, puppy!" he chirped to the highly
interested dog.  "Let's be on our way.  Perhaps we can find
the people who lost you.  That's what I've been wanting to do,
all day, you know," he added, in a lower voice, speaking
confidentially to the dog, and beginning to stroll off toward
the woods.

But the barefoot man would not have it so.  Now, he
understood.  This sissyfied chap, with the high and-mighty
airs, was bluffing.  That was what he was doing.  Bluffing!
Did he think for a minute he could get away with it, and with
the dog?

A swirl of red fury swept to the beach comber's brain.
Wordless, face distorted, he flung himself at the elusive
Brice.

So sudden was his spring that it threatened to take its victim
unaware.  Brice's back was turned to the aggressor, and he was
already on his way toward the woods.

Yet, with but a fraction of an inch to spare, he turned to
face the oncoming human whirlwind.  This time he did not dart
back from the rush.  Perhaps he did not care to.  Perhaps
there was not time.

Instead, with the speed of light, he stepped in, ducking the
hammer-fist and plying both hands with bewildering quickness
and skill, in a shower of half-arm blows at the beach comber's
heart and wind.  His strength was wiry and carefully
developed, but it was no match for his foe's.  Yet the hail of
body-punches was delivered with all the effect that science
and a perfect knowledge of anatomy could compass.

The beach comber grunted and writhed in sharp discomfort.
Then, he did the one thing possible, by way of reprisal.
Before Brice could dodge out of his close-quarters position,
the other clasped him tight in his bulgingly powerful arms,
gripping the lighter man to his chest in a hug which had the
gruesome force of a boa-constrictor's, and increasing the
pressure with all his weight and mighty strength.


There was no space for maneuvering or for wriggling free.
Clear from the ground Brice's feet were swung.  The breath was
squeezed out of him.  His elastic strength was cramped and
made useless.  His lungs seemed bursting.  The pressure on his
ribs was unbearable.  Like many a better man he was paying the
price for a single instant of overconfidence.

One arm was caught against his side.  The other was impeded
and robbed of all efficient hitting power, being pinioned
athwart his breast.  And steadily the awful pressure was
increased.  There was no apparent limit to the beach comber's
powers of constriction.  The blood beat into Brice's eyes.
His tongue began to protrude from a swollen throat.

Then, all at once, he ceased to struggle, and lay limp and
moveless in the conqueror's grasp.  Perceiving which, the
beach comber relaxed the pressure, to let his conquered enemy
slide, broken, to the ground.

This, to his blank amaze, Gavin Brice neglected to do.  The
old ruse of apparent collapse had served its turn, for perhaps
the millionth time.  The beach-comber was aware of a
lightning-quick tensing of the slumped muscles.  Belatedly, he
knew what had happened, and he renewed his vise-grip.  But he
was too late.  Eel-like, Gavin had slithered out of the
imprisoning arms.  And, as these arms came together once more,
in the bear-hug, Brice shot over a burning left-hander to the
beach-comber's unguarded jaw.  Up flew the big arms in belated
parry, but not soon enough to block a deliberately-aimed right
swing, which Brice drove whizzing into the jaw's point.

The brace of blows rocked the giant, so that he reeled
drunkenly under their dynamic force.  The average man must
have been floored and even knocked senseless by such
well-directed smashes to so vital a spot.  But the
beach-comber merely staggered back, seeking instinctively to
guard his battered face, and to regain his balance.

In at the reeling foe tore Gavin Brice, showering him with
systematic punches to every vulnerable spot above the belt
line.  It was merciless punishment, and it was delivered with
rare deftness.

Yet, the iron-bodied man on whom it was inflicted merely
grunted again and, under the avalanche of blows, managed to
regain his balance and plunge back to the assault.  A born
fighter, he was now obsessed with but one idea, namely, to
destroy this smaller and faster opponent who was hurting him
so outrageously.  As far as the beach comber was concerned: it
was a murder-battle now, with no question of mercy asked or
given.

The collie had been viewing this astounding scene in eager
interest.  Never before, in his short life, had he seen two
humans fight.  And, even now, he was not at all certain that
it was a fight and not some intensely thrilling game.  Thus
had he watched two boys wrestle and box, in his own puppyhood.
And, for venturing to jump into that jolly fracas, he had been
scolded and sent back to his kennel.

Yet, there was something about this clash, between the giant
who had mistreated him and the softer-voiced man who had
rescued him, which spoke of mad excitement, and which stirred
the collie's own excitable temperament to the very depths.
Dancingly, he pattered around the fighters, tulip ears cocked,
deep-set eyes aglow, his fanfare of barks echoing far back
through the silent woods.

The beach comber, rallying from the dual jaw-bombardment,
bored back at his foe, taking the heaviest and most scientific
punishment, in a raging attempt to gather Brice once more into
the trap of his terrible arms.  But Gavin kept just out of
reach, moving with an almost insolent carelessness, and ever
flashing some painful blow to face or to body as he retreated.

Then, as the other charged, Gavin sidestepped with perfect
ease, and, when the beach-comber wheeled clumsily to face him,
threw one foot forward and at the same time pushed the larger
man's shoulder violently with his open palm.  It was a
repetition of the "leverage theory" Gavin had so recently been
expounding to his antagonist.  It caught the lunging giant at
precisely the right non-balance angle, as he was turning about.
And, for the second time, the beach-comber sat down on the
trampled sand, with unexpected suddenness and force.

Gavin Brice laughed aloud, with boyish mischief, and stood
back, waiting for the cursing madman to scramble to his feet
again.  But, as the beach comber leaped up--and before he
could get fairly balanced on his legs--another foot-and-palm
maneuver sent him sprawling.

This time the puffing and foaming and insanely-badgered man
did not try at once to rise.  Instead, his hand whipped back
to his thigh.

"My clumsy friend," Brice was saying, pleasantly, "I'm afraid
you'll never win that watch.  Shall we call it a day and quit?
Or--"

He broke off with an exclamation of genuine wrath.  For, with
astonishing swiftness, the big hand had flown to the hip of
the ragged trousers, had plucked a short-bladed fishing knife
from its sheath, and had hurled it, dexterously, with the
strength of a catapult, straight at his smiling adversary's
throat.

The sub-tropic beach comber and the picaroon acquire nasty
tricks with knives, and have an uncanny skill at their use.

Brice twisted to one side, with a sharp suddenness that all
but threw his back out of joint.  The knife whizzed through
the still air like a great hornet.  The breath of its passage
fanned Gavin's averted face, as he wrenched his head out of
its path.

The collie had watched the supposed gambols of the two men
with keen, but impersonal, interest.  But here at last was
something he could understand.  Instinct teaches practically
every dog the sinister nature of a thrown object.  The man on
the ground had hurled something at the man whom the collie
had begun to love.  That meant warfare.  To the canine mind
it could mean nothing else.

And, ruff a-bristle and teeth bared, the dog flew at the beach
comber.  The latter had followed his throw by leaping to his
feet.  But, as he rose, the collie was at him.  For an
instant, the furry whirlwind was snarling murderously at his
throat, and the man was beating convulsively at this
unexpected new enemy.

Then, almost before the collie could slash to the bone one of
the hairy big hands that thrust him backward, Gavin Brice had
reached the spot in a single bound, had shoved the dog to one
side and was at the man.

"Clear out, puppy!" he shouted, imperatively.  "This is my
meat!  When people get to slinging knives, there's no more
sense in handling them with gloves!"

The debonaire laziness was gone from Brice's voice and manner.
His face was dead-white.  His eyes were blazing.  His mouth
was a mere gash in the grim face.  Even as he spoke, he had
thrust the snarling collie away, and was at the beach-comber.

No longer was it a question of boxing or of half-jesting
horseplay.  The use of the knife had put this fight on a new
plane.  And, like a wild beast, Gavin Brice was attacking his
big foe.  But, unlike a wild beast, he kept his head, as he
charged.

Disregarding the menace of the huge arms, he came to grips,
without striking a single blow.  Around him the beach-comber
flung his constricting grasp.  But this time the grip was
worthless.

For, Brice's left shoulder jutted out in such manner as to
keep the arms from getting their former hold around the body
itself, and Brice's right elbow held off the grip on the other
side.  At the same time the top of Brice's head buried itself
under the beachcomber's chin, forcing the giant's jaw upward
and backward.  Then, safe inside his opponent's guard, he
abandoned his effort to stave off the giant's hold, and passed
his own arms about the other's waist, his hands meeting under
the small of the larger man's back.

The beach comber tried now to use his freed arms to gain the
grip that had once been so effective.  But his clasp could
close only over the slope of Brice's back and could find no
purchase.

While the man was groping for the right hold, Gavin threw all
his own power into a single move.  Tightening his underhold,
and drawing in on the small of the giant's back, he raised
himself on his toes, and pressed the top of his head, with all
his might, against the bottom of the beach-comber's chin.

The trick was not new.  But it was fearsomely effective.  It
was, as Gavin had explained, all a question of leverage.  The
giant's waist was drawn forward, His chin, simultaneously, was
shoved backward.  Such a dual cross pressure was due, eventually,
to mean one of two things:--either the snapping of the spine or
else the breaking of the neck.  Unless the grip could be broken,
there was no earthly help for its victim.

The beach comber, in agony of straining spine and throat,
thrashed wildly to free himself.  He strove to batter the
tenacious little man to senselessness.  But he could hit
nothing but the sloping back, or aim clumsily cramped hooks
for the top and sides of Gavin's protected head.

Meantime, the pressure was increasing, with a coldly scientific
precision.  Human nature could not endure it.  In his extremity,
the beach comber attempted the same ruse that had been so
successful for Brice.  He slumped, in pseudo-helplessness.  The
only result was to enable Gavin to tighten his hold, unopposed
by the tensing of the enemy's wall of muscles.

"I'm through!" bellowed the tortured giant, stranglingly, his
entire huge body one horror of agony.  "'Nuff!  I'm--"

He got no further.  For, the unspeakable anguish mounted to
his brain.  And he swooned.

Gavin Brice let the great body slide inert to the sand.  He
stood, flushed and panting a little, looking down at the hulk
he had so nearly annihilated.  Then, as the beach comber's
limbs began to twitch and his eyelids to quiver, Brice turned
away.

"Come along, puppy," he bade the wildly excited collie.  "He
isn't dead.  Another couple of seconds and his neck or his
back must have gone.  I'm glad he fainted first.  A killing
isn't a nice thing to remember on wakeful nights, the killing
of even a cur like that.  Come on, before he wakes up.  I'm
going somewhere.  And it's a stroke of golden luck that I've
got you to take with me, by way of welcome."

He had picked up and pocketed his watch.  Now, lifting the
knife, he glanced shudderingly at its ugly curved blade.  Then
he tossed it far out into the water.  After which, he chirped
again to the gladly following collie and made off down the
beach, toward a loop of mangrove swamp that swelled out into
the water a quarter-mile farther on.

The dog gamboled gayly about him, as they walked, and tried to
entice him into a romp.  Prancing invitingly toward Brice, the
collie would then flee from him in simulated terror.  Next,
crouching in front of him, the dog would snatch up a mouthful
of sand, growl, and make pattering gestures with his white
forefeet at Gavin's dusty shoes.

Failing to lure his new master into a frolic, the dog fell
sober and paced majestically alongside him, once or twice
earning an absent-minded pat on the head by thrusting his
muzzle into the cup of the walker's hand.

As they neared the loop of the swamp, the collie looked back,
and growled softly, under his breath.  Gavin followed the
direction of the dog's gaze.  He saw the beach comber sit up,
and then, with much pain and difficulty, get swayingly to his
feet.

"Don't worry, old chap," Gavin said to the growling collie.
"He's had all he can carry, for one day.  He's not going to
follow us.  By this time, he'll begin to realize, too, that
his face is battered pretty much to a pulp, and that some of
my body-smashes are flowering into bruises.  I pity him when
he wakes up to-morrow.  He'll be too stiff to move an inch,
without grunting.  His pluck and his nerve are no match for
his strength ....  Here we are!" he broke off, beginning to
skirt the hither edge of the swamp.  "Unless all my dope is
wrong, it ought to be somewhere close to this."

He walked more slowly, his keen eyes busily probing the
impenetrable face of the swamp.  He was practically at the
very end of the beach.  In front, the mangroves ran out into
the water, and in an unbroken line they extended far back to
landward.

The shining dark leaves made a thick screen, shutting from
view the interior of the swamp.  The reddish roots formed an
equally impenetrable fence, two feet high, all along the edge.
It would have been easier to walk through a hedge of bayonets
than to invade that barrier.

"Where mangroves grow, puppy," exhorted Brice, "there is
water.  Salt water, at that.  The water runs in far, here.
You can see that, by the depth of this mangrove forest.  At
first glance, it looks like an impasse, doesn't it?  And yet
it isn't.  Because--"

He broke off, in his ruminative talk.  The collie, bored
perhaps, by standing still so long, had at first turned
seaward.  But, as a wavelet washed against his white forefeet,
he drew back, annoyed, and began aimlessly to skirt the swamp,
to landward.  Before he had traveled twenty yards, he
vanished.

For a second or so, Gavin Brice stared stupidly at the
phenomenon of the jungle-like wall of mangroves that had
swallowed a seventy-pound dog.  Then his brow cleared, and a
glint of eagerness came into his eye.  Almost running, he
hurried to the spot where the dog had vanished.  Then he
halted, and called softly:

"Come, puppy!  Here!"

In immediate obedience to his call, the dog reappeared, at the
swamp's edge, wagging his plumy tail, glad to be summoned.
Before the collie could stir, Brice was at his side, taking
sharp note of the direction from which the dog had just
stepped out of the mangroves.

In front, the wall of leaves and branches still hung,
seemingly impenetrable.  The chief difference between this
spot and any on either side, was that the mangrove boughs had
apparently been trained to hang so low that the roots were
invisible.

Tentatively, Brice drew aside an armful of branches, just
above the waiting dog.  And, as though he had pulled back a
curtain, he found himself facing a well-defined path, cut
through the tangled thicket of root and trunk and bough--a
path that wound out of sight in the dark recesses of the
swamps.

Roots had been cleared away and patches of water filled with
them and with earth.  Here and there a plank bridge spanned a
gap of deeper water.  Altogether--so far as Brice could judge
in the fading light--the path was an excellent bit of rustic
engineering.  And it was hidden as cunningly from casual eyes
as ever was a hermit thrush's nest.

Some one had been at much pains and at more expense, to lay
out and develop that secret trail.  For it is no easy or cheap
task to build a sure path through such a swamp.  From a
distance, forests of mangrove seemed to be massed on rising
ground, and to group themselves about the sides and the crests
of knolls.  As a matter of fact, the presence of a mangrove
forest is a sign of the very lowest ground, ground covered for
the most part by salt tidewater.  The lowest pine barren is
higher than the loftiest mangrove wilderness.

Gavin Brice's aspect of lassitude dropped from him like an
outworn garment.  For hours--except during his brief encounter
with the beach comber--he had been steadily on the move, and
had covered a good bit of ground.  Yet, any one, seeing him as
he traversed the miles from the Royal Palm Park at Miami,
would have supposed from his gait that he was on some aimless
ramble.  Now, alert, quick-stepping, eager, he made his swift
way along the windings of the secret path.

Light as were his steps, they creaked lamentably at times on
the boards of a bridge-span.  More than once, he heard
slitherings, in the water and marsh to either side, as some
serpent or other slimy swamp-dweller wriggled away, at his
passing.  The collie trotted gravely along, just in front of
him, pausing once in a while, as if to make certain the man
was following.

The silence and gloom and sinister solemnity of the place had
had a dampening effect on the dog's gay spirits.  The backward
glances at his self-chosen master were for reassuring himself,
rather than for
guidance.  Surroundings have quicker and stronger effect on
collies than on almost any other kind of dog.  And these
surroundings, very evidently, were not to the collie's taste.
Several times, when the path's width permitted, he dropped
back to Gavin's side, to receive a word of friendly
encouragement or a pat on the head.

Outside of the grove's shadows the sun was sinking.  Not with
the glowing deliberation of sunsets in northern latitudes, but
with almost indecent haste.  In the dense shade of the forest,
twilight had fallen.  But the path still lay clear.  And
Brice's footsteps quickened, as in a race with darkness.

Then, at a twist of the path, the way suddenly grew lighter.
And at another turn, twilight brightened into clearness.  A
hundred feet ahead was a thin interlacing of moonflower vines,
compact enough, no doubt, to
prevent a view of the path to any one standing in the stronger
light beyond the grove, but making distinct to Brice a grassy
clearing beyond.

Upon this clearing, the brief bright afterglow was shining,
for the trim grass and shrubs of an upwardsloping lawn were
clearly visible.  For some minutes the water and the swamp
underfoot had given place to firmer ground, and the character
of the trees themselves had changed.  Evidently, the trail
had its ending at that screen of vineleaves draped between two
giant gumbo-limbo trees at the lawn's verge.

Thirty feet from the vines, Brice slackened his steps.  His
lithe body was vibrant with cautious watchfulness.  But, the
collie was not inclined to caution.  He hailed with evident
relief the sight of open spaces and of light after the gloomy
trail's windings.  And he broke into a canter.

Fearing to call aloud, Brice chirped and hissed softly at the
careering dog.  The collie, at sound of the recall, hesitated,
then began to trot back toward Gavin.  But, glancing wistfully
toward the light, as he started to obey the summons, his eye
encountered something which swept away all his dawning impulse
of obedience.

Athwart the bright end of the path, sprang a furry gray
creature, supple, fluffy, indescribably formless and immense
in that deceptive half-light.

Brice peered at the animal in astonishment, seeking to
classify it in his mind.  But the collie needed no effort of
that sort.  At first sight and scent, he knew well to what
tribe the furry gray newcomer belonged.  And, with a
trumpet-bark of joyous challenge, he dashed at it.

The creature fluffed itself to double its former size.  Then,
spitting and yowling, it ran up the nearer of the two
gumbo-limbo trees.  The dog reached the foot of the tree a
fraction of a second too late to seize the fox-like tail of
his prey.  And he circled wildly, barking at the top of his
lungs and making futile little running leaps up the shining
trunk of the tree.

As well hope for secrecy after the firing of a cannon as after
such a fanfare of barking!  Gavin Brice ran forward to grasp
the rackety collie.  As he did so, he was vaguely aware that a
slender and white-clad form was crossing the lawn, at a run,
toward the tree.

At the path-end, he and the figure came face to face.  Though
the other's back was to the fading light, Gavin
knew her for the girl he had seen in the Australian pine lane,
at Miami, that day.

"Pardon me," he began, trying in vain to make himself audible
through the collie's frantic barking.  "I found your dog, and
I have brought him back to you.  We--"

The glib explanation died, in his amazement-contracting
throat.  For, at his first word, the girl had checked her run
and had stood for an instant, gazing wideeyed at him.  Then,
clapping one little hand to her side, she produced from
somewhere a flash of metal.

And Gavin Brice found himself blinking stupidly into the
muzzle of a small revolver, held, unwaveringly, not three feet
from his face.  Behind the gun were a pair of steady gray eyes
and a face whose dainty outlines were just now set in a mask
of icy grimness.

"That isn't a bluff," ran his involuntary thoughts, as he read
the eyes behind the ridiculously tiny weapon.  "She really
means to shoot!"




CHAPTER II

THE MAN IN THE DARK


For several seconds the two stood thus, the man dumfounded,
moveless, gaping, the girl as grimly resolute as Fate itself,
the little revolver steady, its muzzle unwaveringly menacing
Brice's face.  The collie continued to gyrate, thunderously
around the tree.

"I don't want to shoot you," said the girl presently, and,
through her voice's persistent sternness, Gavin fancied he
could read a thrill of very feminine concern.  "I don't want
to shoot you.  If I can help it.  You will put your hands up."

Meekly, Brice obeyed.

"Now," she resumed, "you will turn around, and go back the way
you came.  And you will go as fast as you can travel.  I shall
follow you to the second turning.  Then I shall fire into the
air.  That will bring--one or more of the men.  And they will
see you don't turn back.  I'm--I'm giving you that much chance
to get away.  Because I--I don't want--"

She hesitated.  The grimness had begun to seep out of her
sweet voice.  The revolver-muzzle wobbled, ever so little.

"I'm sorry," began Brice.  "But--"

"I don't care to hear any explanations," she cut him short,
sternly.  "Your coming along that path could mean only one
thing.  You will do as I say.--You will turn about and make
what use you can of the start I'm offering you.  Now--"

"I'm sorry," repeated Brice, more determinedly, and trying
hard to keep his twitching face straight.  "But I can't do
what you ask.  It was hard enough coming along that path,
while the light lasted.  If I were to go back over it in the
dark, I'd break my neck on a million mangrove roots.  If it's
just the same to you, I'll take my chances with the pistol.
It'll be an easier death, and in pleasanter company.  So, if
you really must shoot then blaze away!"

He lowered his upraised arms, folding them melodramatically on
his breast, while he sought, through the gloom, to note the
effect of his solemnly uttered speech.  The effect was far
different and less sensational than he had expected.  At the
first sound of his voice that was audible above the collie's
barks, the girl lowered the revolver and leaned forward to get a
clearer view of his face, beneath the shadow of the vine-leaves.

"I--I thought--" she stammered, and added lamely "I thought
you were--were--were some one else."  She paused, then she
went on with some slight return of her earlier sternness "Just
the same, your coming here by that path..."

"There is no magic about it," he assured her, "and very little
mystery.  I was taking a stroll along the shore, when I
happened upon that mass of dynamite and fur and springs,
yonder.  (In his rare moments of calm, he is a collie,--the
best type of show collie, at that.) He ran ahead of me,
through the tangle of mangrove boughs.  I followed, and found
a path.  He seemed anxious to explore the path, and I kept on
following him, until--"

The girl seemed for the first time aware of the dog's noisy
presence.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, looking at the rackety and leaping collie
in much surprise.  "I thought it was the stable dog that had
treed Simon Cameron!  I didn't notice.  He-- Why!" she cried,
"that's Bobby Burns!  We lost him, on the way here from the
station!  My brother has gone back to Miami to offer a reward
for him.  He came from the North, this morning.  We drove into
town to get him.  On the way out, he must have fallen from the
back seat.  We didn't miss him till we-- How did you happen
to find him?"

"He was on the beach, back yonder," explained Brice.  "He
seemed to adopt me, and..."

"Haven't I met you, somewhere?" she broke in, studying his
dim-seen face more intently and at closer range.

"No," he made answer.  "But you've seen me.  At least I saw
you.  You, and a big man with a gold beard and a white silk
suit, and this collie, were in a car, listening to Bryan's
sermon, this morning.  I recognized the collie, as soon as I
saw him again.  And I guessed what must have happened.  I
guessed, too, that he was a new dog, and that he hadn't
learned the way home, yet.  It's lucky I was able to bring him
to you.  Or, rather, that he was able to bring himself to
you."

"And to think I rewarded you for all your trouble, by
threatening to shoot you!" she said, in sharp contrition.

"Oh, please don't feel sorry for that!" he begged.  "It wasn't
really as deadly as you made it seem.  That is an old style
revolver, you see, vintage of 1880 or thereabouts, I should
say.  Not a self-cocker.  And, you'll notice it isn't cocked.
So, even if you had stuck to your lethal threat and had pulled
the trigger ever so hard, I'd still be more or less alive.
You'll excuse me for mentioning it," he ended in apology,
noting her crestfallen air.  "Any novice in the art of slaying
might have done the same thing.  Shooting people is an
accomplishment that improves with practice."

Coldly, she turned away, and crossed to where the collie was
beginning to weary of his fruitless efforts to climb the
shinily smooth bark of the giant gumbo-limbo.  Catching him by
the collar, she said:

"Bobby!  Bobby Burns!  Stop that silly barking!  Stop it at
once!  And leave poor little Simon Cameron alone!  Aren't you
ashamed?"

Now, Bobby was not in the least ashamed--except for his
failure to reach his elusive prey.  But, like many highbred
and highstrung collies, he did not fancy having his collar
seized by a stranger.  He did not resent the act with snarls
and a show of teeth, as in the case of the beach comber.  But
he stiffened to offended dignity, and, with a sudden jerk,
freed himself from the little detaining hand.

Then, loftily, he stalked across to Gavin and thrust his
muzzle once more into the man's cupped palm.  As clearly as by
a dictionary-ful of words, he had rebuked her familiarity and
had shown to whom he felt he owed sole allegiance.

While the girl was still staring in rueful indignation at this
snub from her dog, Brice found time and thought to stare with
still greater intentness up the tree, at a bunch of bristling
fur which occupied the first crotch and which glared
wrathfully down at the collie.

He made out the contour and bashed-in profile of a huge
Persian cat, silver-gray of hue, dense of coat, green of eye.

"So that's Simon Cameron?" he queried.  "What a beauty!  And
what a quaintly Oriental name you've chosen for him!"

"He is named," said the girl, still icily, "for a statesman my
parents admired.  My brother says our Persian's hair is just
the same color as Simon Cameron's used to be.  That's why we
named him that.  You'll notice the cat has the beautifullest
silvery gray hair--"

"Prematurely gray, I'm sure," put in Brice, civilly.

She looked at him, in doubt.  But his face was grave.  And she
turned to the task of coaxing the indignant Simon Cameron from
his tree-refuge.

"Simon Cameron always walks around the grounds with me, at
sunset," she explained, in intervals of cajoling the grumpy
mass of fluff to descend.  "And he ran ahead of me, to-day, to
the edge of the path.  That must have been when Bobby caught
sight of him..."

"Come, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" she coaxed.  "Do be a good little
cat, and come down.  See, the dog can't get at you, now.  He's
being held.  Come!"

The allurement of his mistress's voice produced no stirring
effect on the temperamental Simon Cameron.  Beyond leaving the
crotch and edging mincingly downward, a yard or so, the
Persian refused to obey the crooning summons.  Plastered flat
against the tree trunk, some nine feet above the ground, he
miaued dolefully.

"Hold Bobby's collar," suggested Brice, "and I think I can get
the prematurely grizzled catling to earth."

The girl came over to where man and dog stood, and took Bobby
Burns by the collar.  Brice crossed to the tree and looked
upward at the yowling Simon Cameron.

"Hello, you good little cat!" he hailed, cooingly.  "Cats
always like to be called 'good,' you know.  All of us are
flattered when we're praised for something we aren't.  A dog
doesn't care much about being called 'good.' Because he knows
he is.  But a cat..."

As he talked, Gavin scratched gratingly on the tree trunk, and
gazed up in ostentatious admiration at the coy Simon Cameron.
The Persian, like all his kind, was foolishly open to
admiration.  Brice's look, his crooning voice, his
entertaining fashion of scratching the tree for the cat's
amusement all these proved a genuine lure.  Down the tree
started Simon Cameron, moving backward, and halting
coquettishly at every few inches.

Gavin reached up and lifted the fluffy creature from the
trunk, cradling him in expert manner in the crook of one arm.
Simon Cameron forgot his fear and purred loudly, rubbing his
snub-nose face against his captor's sleeve.

"Don't feel too much flattered," adjured the girl.  "He's like
that, with all strangers.  As soon as he has known most people
a day or two, he'll have nothing to do with them."

"I know," assented Gavin.  "That's a trick of Persian cats.
They have an inordinate interest in every one except the
people they know.  Their idea of heaven is to be admired by a
million strangers at a time.  If
I'd had any tobacco-reek on me, Simon Cameron wouldn't have
let me hold him as long as this.  Persian's hate tobacco."

He set the soothed animal down on the lawn, where, after one
scornful look at the tugging and helpless dog, Simon Cameron
proceeded to rub his arched back against the man's legs, thus
transferring a goodly number of fluffy gray hairs to Brice's
shabby trousers.  Tiring of this, he minced off, affectedly,
toward the distant house that stood at the landward end of the
sloping lawn.

As he set the cat down, Brice had stepped out of the shadows
of the grove, into the open.  And now, not only his face, but
his whole body was clearly visible in the dying daylight.  The
girl's eyes ran appraisingly over the worn clothes and the
cracking and dusty shoes.  Brice felt, rather than saw, her
appraisal.  And he knew she was contrasting his costume with
his voice and his clean-shaven face.  She broke the moment of
embarrassed silence by saying "You must be tired after your
long tramp, from Miami.  Were you walking for fun and
exercise, or are you bound for any especial place?"  He knew
she was fencing, that his clothes made her wonder if she ought
not to offer him some cash payment for finding her dog,--a
reward she would never have dreamed of offering on the
strength of his manner and voice.  Also, it seemed, she was
seeking some way of closing the interview without dismissing
him or walking away.  And he answered with perfect
simplicity:

"No, I wasn't walking for exercise or fun.  There are better
and easier ways of acquiring fun than by plodding for hours in
the hot sunshine.  And of getting exercise, too.  I was on my
way to Homestead or to some farming place along the line,
where I might pick up a job."

"Oh!"

"Yes.  I could probably have gotten a place as dishwasher or
even as a 'bus' or porter, in one of the big Miami hotels," he
pursued, "or a billet with one of the dredging gangs in the
harbor.  But somehow I'd rather do farm work of some sort.  It
seems less of a slump, when a chap is down on his luck, than
to go in for scrubbing or for section-gang hustling.  There
are farms and citrus groves, all along here, just back of the
bay.  And I'm looking for one of them where I can get a decent
day's work to do and a decent day's wages for doing it."

He spoke with an almost overdone earnestness.  The girl was
watching him, attentively, a furrow between her straight
brows.  Somehow, her level look made him uncomfortable.  He
continued, with a shade less assurance:

"I was brought up on a farm, though I haven't been on one
since I was eighteen.  I might have been better off if I'd
stayed there.  Anyhow, when a man's prospects of starving are
growing brighter every day, a farm-job is about the pleasantest
sort of work he can find."

"Starving!" she repeated, in something like contempt.  "If you
had been in this region a little longer--say, long enough to
pronounce the name, 'Miami' as it's pronounced down here,
instead of calling it 'Me-ah-mee,' as you did--if you'd been
here longer, you'd know that nobody need starve in Florida.
Nobody who is willing to work.  There's the fishing, and the
construction gangs, and the groves, and the farms, and a
million other ways of making a living.  The weather lets you
sleep outdoors, if you have to.  The..."

"I've done it," he chimed in.  "Slept outdoors, I mean.  Last
night, for instance.  I slept very snugly indeed, under a
Traveler Tree in the gardens of the Royal Palm Hotel.  There
was a dance at the hotel.  I went to sleep, under the stars,
to the lullaby of a corking good orchestra.  The only drawback
was that a spooning couple who were engineering a 'petting
party,' almost sat down on my head, there in the darkness.
Not that I'd have minded being a settee for them.  But they
might have told one of the watchmen about my being there.  And
I'd have had to hunt other sleeping quarters."

She did not abate that look of quizzical appraisal.  And again
Gavin Brice began to feel uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

"You have an orange grove, back yonder, haven't you?" he
asked, abruptly, nodding toward a landward stretch of ground
shut off from the lawn by a thickset hedge of oleander.

"How did you know?" she demanded in suspicion.  "By this light
you couldn't possibly see--"

"Oddly enough," he said, in the pleasant drawling voice she
was learning to like in spite of her better judgment, "oddly
enough, I was born with a serviceable pair of nostrils.  There
is a scent of orange blossoms hanging fairly strong in the
air.  It doesn't come from the mangrove swamp behind me or
from the highroad in front of your house or from the big
garden patch to the south of the lawn.  So I made a Sherlock
Holmes guess that it must be over there to northward, and
pretty close.  Besides, that's the only direction the Trade
Winds could bring the scent from."

Again, she was aware of a certain glibness in his tone,--a
glibness that annoyed her and at the same time piqued her
curiosity.

"Yes," she said, none too cordially.  "Our orange groves are
there.  Why do you ask?"

"Only," he replied, "because where there are large citrus
groves on one side of a house and fairly big vegetable gardens
on the other, it means the need for a good bit of labor.  And
that may mean a chance for a job.  Or it may not.  You'll pardon
my suggesting it.

"My brother needs no more labor," she replied.  "At least, I
am quite certain he doesn't.  In fact, he has more men working
here now than he actually needs.  I--I've heard him say so.
Of course, I'll be glad to ask him, when he comes back from
town.  And if you'd care to leave your address--"

"Gladly," said Brice.  "Any letter addressed to me, as 'Gavin
Brice, in care of Traveler Tree, rear gardens of Royal Palm
Hotel,' will reach me.  Unless, of course, the night watchmen
chance to root me out.  In that case, I'll leave word with
them where mail may be forwarded.  In the meantime, it's
getting pretty dark, and I don't know this part of Dade County
as well as I'd like to.  So I'll be starting on.  If you don't
mind, I'll cross your lawn, and take the main road.  It's
easier going, at night than by way of the mangrove swamp and
the beach.  Good night, Miss--"

"Wait!" she interposed, worry creeping into her sweet voice.
"I--I can't let you go like this.  Do you really mean you have
to sleep out of doors and that you have no money?  I don't
want to be impertinent, but--"

"'Nobody need starve in Florida,'" he quoted, gravely.
"'Nobody who is willing to work.  The weather lets you sleep
outdoors.'  (In which, the weather chimes harmoniously with my
pocketbook.)  And, as I am extremely 'willing to work,' it
follows that I can't possibly starve.  But I thank you for
feeling concerned about me.  It's a long day since a woman has
bothered her head whether I live or die.  Good night, again,
Miss--"

A second time, she ignored his hint that she tell him her
name.  Too much worried over his light words and the real need
they seemed to cover, to heed the subtler intent, she said, a
little tremulously:

"I--I don't understand you, at all.  Not that it is any
business of mine, of course.  But I hate to think that any one
is in need of food or shelter.  Your voice and your face and
the way you talk--they don't fit in with the rest of you.
Such men as yourself don't drift, penniless, through Lower
Florida, looking for day-laborer jobs.  I can't understand--"

"Every one who speaks decent English and yet is down-and-out,"
he said, quietly, "isn't necessarily a tramp or a fugitive
from justice.  And he doesn't need to be a man of mystery,
either.  Suppose, let's say, a clerk in New York has been too
ill, for a long time, to work.  Suppose illness has eaten all
his savings, and that he doesn't care to borrow, when he knows
he may never be able to pay.  Suppose his doctor tells him he
must go South, to get braced up, and to avoid a New York
February and March.  Suppose the patient has only about money
enough to get here, and relies on finding something to do to
keep him in food and lodging.  Well--there's nothing
mysterious or especially discreditable in that, is there? ...
The dew is beginning to fall.  And I'm keeping you out here in
the damp.  Good night, Miss--Miss--"

"Standish," she supplied, but speaking absently, her
mind still perturbed at his plight.  "My name is Standish.
Claire Standish."

"Mine is Gavin Brice," he said.  "Good night.  Keep hold of
Bobby Burns's collar, till I'm well on my way.  He may try to
follow me.  Good-by, old chap," he added, bending down and
taking the collie's silken head affectionately between his
hands.  "You're a good dog, and a good pal.  But put the soft
pedal on the temperamental stuff, when you're near Simon
Cameron.  That's the best recipe for avoiding a scratched
nose.  By the way, Miss Standish, don't encourage him to roam
around in the palmetto scrub, on your outings with him.  The
rattlesnakes have gotten many a good dog, in Florida.  He--"

"Mr. Brice!" she broke in.  "If I offend you, I can't help it.
Won't you please let me--let me lend you enough money to keep
you going, till you get a good job?  Please do!  Of course,
you can pay me, as soon as--"

"'I have not found such faith,--no, not in Israel!'" quoted
Brice, a new note in his voice which somehow stirred the
embarrassed girl's heart.  "You have only my bare word that
I'm not a panhandler or a crook.  And yet you believe in me
enough to--"

"You will let me?" she urged, eagerly.  "Say you will!  Say
it."

"I'll make cleaner use of your faith," he returned, "by asking
you to say a good word for me to your brother, if ever I come
back here looking for a job.  No, no!" he broke off, fiercely,
before she could answer.  "I don't mean that.  You must do
nothing of the kind.  Forget I asked it."

With which amazing outburst, he turned on his heel, ran across
the lawn, leaped the low privet hedge which divided it from
the coral road, and made off at a swinging pace in the
direction of Coconut Grove and Miami.

"What a fool--and what a cur--a man can make of himself," he
muttered disgustedly as he strode along, without daring to
look back at the wondering little white-clad figure, watching
him out of sight around the bend, "when he gets to talking
with a woman--a woman with--with eyes like hers!  They--why,
they make me feel as if I was in church!  What sort of
bungling novice am I, anyhow, for work like this?"

With a grunt of self-contempt, he drove his hands deep into
the pockets of his shabby trousers and quickened his pace.
His fingers closed mechanically around a roll of bills, of
very respectable size, in the depths of his right-hand pocket.
The gesture caused a litter of small change to give forth a
muffled jingle.  A sense of shame crept over the man, at the
contact.

"She wanted to lend me money!" he muttered, half-aloud.
"Money!  Not give it to me, as a beggar, but to lend it to
me....  Her nose has the funniest little tilt to it!  And she
can't be an inch over five feet tall! ...  I'm a wall-eyed
idiot!"

He stood aside to let two cars pass him, one going in either
direction.  The lamps of the car from the west, traveling
east, showed him for a moment the occupant of the car that was
moving westward.  The brief ray shone upon a pair of shoulders
as wide as a steam radiator.  They were clad in loose-fitting
white silk.  Above them a thick golden beard caught the ray of
shifting light.  Then, both cars had passed on, and Brice was
resuming his trudge.

"Milo Standish!" he mused, looking back at the car as it
vanished in a cloudlet of white coral-dust.  "Milo Standish!
...  As big as two elephants ....  'The bigger they are, the
harder they fall.'"

The road curved, from the Standish estate, in almost a "C"
formation, before straightening out, a mile to the north, into
the main highway.  Gavin Brice had just reached the end of the
"C" when there was a scurrying sound behind him, in a
grapefruit grove to his right.  Something light and agile
scrambled over the low coral-block wall, and flung itself
rapturously on him.

It was Bobby Burns.

The collie had suffered himself to be led indoors by the girl
whom he had never seen until that morning, and for whom, thus
far, he had formed no affection.  But his wistful, deepset
dark eyes had followed Gavin Brice's receding form.  He could
not believe this dear new friend meant to desert him.  As
Brice did not stop, nor even look back, the collie waxed
doubtful.  And he tugged to be free.  Claire spoke gently to
him, a slight quiver in her own voice, her dark eyes, like
his, fixed upon the dwindling dark speck on the dusky white
road.

"No, Bobby!" she said, under her breath, as she petted the
restless head.  "He won't come back.  Let's forget all about
it.  We both behaved foolishly, you and I, Bobby.  And
he--well, let's just call him eccentric, and not think about
him any more."

She drew the reluctant collie into the house, and closed the
door.  But, a few minutes later, when her back chanced to be
turned, and when a maid came into the room leaving the door
ajar, Bobby slipped out.

In another five seconds he was in the road, casting about for
Brice's trail.  Finding it, he set off, at a hard gallop,
nostrils close to the ground.  Having once been hit and
bruised, in puppyhood, by a motor car, the dog had a wholesome
respect for such rapid and ill-smelling vehicles.  Thus, as he
saw the lights and heard the engine-purr of one of them,
coming toward him, down the road, he dodged back into the
wayside hedge until it passed.  Which is the reason Milo
Standish failed to see the dog he had been hunting for.

A little later, Brice's scent became so distinct that the
collie could abandon his nose-to-the-ground tactics and strike
across country, by dead-reckoning, guided not only by his nose
but by the sound of Gavin's steps.  Then, in an access of
delight, he burst upon the plodding man.

"Why, Bobby!" exclaimed Brice, touched by the dog's rapture in
having found him again.  "Why, Bobby Burns!  What on earth
made you follow me?  Don't you know I'm not your master?
Don't you, Bobby?"

He was petting the frisking collie as he talked.  But now he
faced about.

"I've got to take you back to her, old man!" he informed the
highly interested dog.  "You belong to her.  And she'll worry
about you.  I'll just take you into the dooryard or to the
front lawn or whatever it is, and tie you there, so some one
will find you.  I don't want to get my plans all messed up by
another talk with her, to-night.  It's a mean trick to play on
you, after you've taken all the trouble to follow me.  But
you're hers.  After this rotten business is all over, maybe
I'll try to buy you.  It's worth ninety per cent of your value
to have had you pick me out for your master.  Any man with
cash enough can be a dog's owner, Bobby.  But all the cash in
the world won't make him the dog's master without the dog's
own consent.  Ever stop to think of that, Bobby?"

As he talked, half incoherently, to the delighted collie,
Gavin was retracing his way over the mile or so he had just
traversed.  He grudged the extra steps.  For the day had been
long and full of exercise.  And he was more than comfortably
tired.  But he kept on, wondering vexedly at the little throb
of eagerness in his heart as Claire Standish's home at last
bulked dimly into view around the last curve of the byroad.

Bobby Burns trotted happily beside him, reveling in the man's
occasional rambling words, as is the flattering way collies
have when they are talked to, familiarly, by the human they
love.  And so the two neared the house, their padding
footsteps noiseless in the soft white dust of the road.

There were lights in several windows.  One strong ray was cast
full across the side lawn, penetrating almost as far as the
beginning of the forest at the rear.  Toward this vivid beam,
Gavin bent his steps, fumbling in his pocket as he went, for
something with which to tie Bobby to the nearest tree.

As he moved forward and left the road for the closecropped
grass of the lawn, he saw a dim white shadow advancing
obliquely in his direction.  And, for an instant, his
heartbeats quickened, ever so slightly.  Then, he was
disgusted with his own fatuousness.  For the white form was
double the size of Claire Standish.  And he knew this was her
brother, crossing from the garage to a door of the house.

The big man swung along with the easy gait of perfect physical
strength.  And as the window, whence flowed the light-ray, was
alongside the door he intended to enter, his journey toward
the house lay in the direct path of the ray.

Brice, in the darkness, just inside the gateway, stood
moveless and waited for him to traverse the hundred feet or so
that remained between him and the veranda.  The collie
fidgeted, at sight of the man in white, and began to growl,
inquiringly, far down in his throat.

Gavin patted Bobby Burns reassuringly on the head, to quiet
him.  He was of no mind to introduce himself at the Standish
home, a second time, as the returner of a runaway dog.
Wherefore, he sought to remain unseen, and to wait with what
patience he could until the householder should have gone
indoors.

Apparently, on reaching home, Standish had driven the car to
the garage and had pottered around there for some minutes
before starting for the house.  He was carrying something
loosely in one hand, and he did not seem in any hurry.

"My friend," said Gavin, soundlessly, "if a girl like Claire
Standish was waiting for me, beyond, that shaft of light, I'd
make the trip in something better than no time at all.  But
then--she's not my sister, thank the good Lord!"

He grinned at his own silly thoughts concerning the girl he
had talked to for so brief a time.  Yet he found himself
looking at her elder brother with a certain reluctant
friendliness, on her account.

Suddenly, the grin was wiped from his face, and he was tense
from head to foot.

Standish, on his way homeward, was strolling past a clump of
dwarf shrubbery.  And, idly watching him, Gavin could have
sworn that one end of the shrubbery moved.

Then, he was no longer in doubt.  The bit of darkness detached
itself from the rest of the shrubbery, as Milo lounged past,
and it sprang, catlike, at the unsuspecting man's back.

Into the path of light it leaped.  In the same atom of time,
Gavin Brice shouted aloud in sharp warning, and dashed forward,
the collie at his side.

But he was fifty feet away.  And his shout served only to make
Standish halt, staring about him.

It was then that the creature from the shrubbery made his
spring.  He struck venomously at Standish, from behind.  And
Gavin could see, in the striking hand, a glitter of steel.

Standish--warned perhaps by sound, perhaps by instinct--wheeled
half-way around.  Thus the knifeblow missed its mark between
his shoulder-blades.  Not the blade, but the fist which
gripped it, smote full on Standish's shoulder.  The deflected
point merely shore the white coat from neck to waist.

There was no scope to strike again.  And the assailant
contented himself with passing his free arm garrotingly around
Standish's neck, from behind, and leaping upward, bringing his
knees into the small of the victim's back.

Here evidently was no amateur slayer.  For, even as the
knife-thrust missed its mark, he had resorted to the second
ruse, and before Standish could turn around far enough to
avert it.

Down went the big man, under the strangle-hold and knee-purchase.
With a crash that knocked the breath out of him and dazed him, he
landed on his back, his head smiting the sward with a resounding
thwack.

His adversary, once more, wasted not a jot of time.  As
Standish struck ground, the man was upon him, knife again
aloft, poised above the helpless Milo's throat.

And it was then that Gavin Brice's flying feet brought him to
the scene.

As he ran he had heard a door open.  And he knew his warning
shout had reached the ears of some one in the house,--perhaps
of Claire.  But he had no time nor thought for anything, just
then, except the stark need of reaching Milo Standish before
the knife could strike.

He launched himself, after the fashion of a football tackle,
straight for the descending arm.  And, for a few seconds all
three men rolled and wallowed and fought in a jumble of flying
arms and legs and heads.

Brice had been lucky enough or dextrous enough to catch the
knife-wielder's wrist and to wrench it far to one side, as it
whizzed downward.  With his other hand he had groped for the
slayer's throat.

Then, he found himself attacked with a maniac fury by the man
whose murderous purpose he had thwarted.  Still gripping the
knife-wrist, he was sore put to it to fend off an avalanche of
blows from the other arm and of kicks from both of the
assailant's deftly plied feet.

Nor was his task made the easier by the fact that Milo
Standish had recovered from the momentary daze, and was
slugging impartially at both the men who rolled and tossed on
top of him.

This, for a short but excessively busy space of moments.
Then, wriggling free of Milo's impeding and struggling bulk,
Brice gained the throat-hold he sought.  Still holding to the
ground the wrist of the knifehand, he dug his supple fingers
deep into the man's throat, disregarding such blows and kicks
as he could not ward off.

There was science in his ferocious onslaught.  And his skilled
fingers had found the windpipe and the carotid artery as well.
With such force as Brice was able to exert, the other's breath
was shut off, while he was all but paralyzed by the digging
pressure into his carotid.

Such a grip is well understood by Japanese athletes, though
its possibilities and method are unknown to the average
Occidental.  Rightly applied, it is irresistible.  Carried to
its conclusion, it spells sudden and agonizing death to its
victim.

And Gavin Brice was carrying it to the conclusion, with all
the sinew and science of his trained arms.

The knifer's strength was gorilla-like.  But that strength, at
every second, was rendered more and more futile.  The man must
have realized it.  For, all at once, he ceased his battery of
kicks and blows, and struggled frantically to tear free.

Each plunging motion merely intensified the pain and power of
the relentless throat-grip that pinioned him.  And, strangling
and panic-struck, he became wilder in his fruitless efforts to
wrench loose.  Then, deprived of breath and with his
nerve-centers shaken, he lost the power to strive.

It was the time for which Gavin had waited.  With perfect
ease, now, he twisted the knife from the failing grasp, and,
with his left hand, he reinforced the throat-grip of his
right.  As he did so, he got his legs under him and arose,
dragging upward with him the all but senseless body of his
garroted foe.

It had been a pretty bit of work, from the start, and one upon
which his monkey-faced Japanese jui-jutsu
instructor would have lavished a grunt of approval.

He had conquered an armed and muscular enemy by his knowledge
of anatomy and by applying the simple grip he had learned.
And now, the heaving half-dead murderer was at his mercy.

Gavin swung the feebly twitching body out, more fully into the
streak of light from the house, noting, subconsciously that
the light ray was twice as broad as before, by reason of the
door's standing open.

But, before he could concentrate his gaze on the man he held,
he saw several million other things.  And all the several
million were multi-hued stars and bursting bombs.

The entire universe seemed to have exploded and to have chosen
the inside of his brain as the site for such annoying
pyrotechnics.  Dully he was aware that his hands were
loosening their death-grip and that his arms were falling to
his sides.  Also, that his knees had turned to hot tallow and
were crumbling, under him.

None of these amazing phenomena struck him as at all
interesting.  Indeed, nothing struck him as worth noting.  Not
even the display of myriad shooting stars.  It all seemed
quite natural, and it all lasted for the merest breath of
time.

Through the universe of varicolored lights and explosions, he
was aware of a woman's cry.  And, somehow, this pierced the
mist of his senses, and found its way to his heart.  But only
for an instant.

Then, instead of tumbling to earth, he felt himself sinking
down, uncountable miles, through a cool darkness.  The dark
was comforting, after all that bothersome display of lights.

And, while he was still falling, he drifted into a dead sleep.




CHAPTER III

THE MOCKING BIRD


After centuries of unconsciousness, Gavin Brice began to
return, bit by bit, to his senses.

The first thing he knew was that the myriad shooting stars in
his head had changed somehow into a myriad shooting pains.  He
was in torment.  And he was deathly sick.

His trained brain forced itself to a semblance of sanity, and
he found himself piecing together vaguely the things that had
happened to him.  He could remember seeing Milo Standish
strolling toward the veranda in the shaft of light from the
window, then the black figure which detached itself from the
shrubbery and sprang on the unheeding man, and his own attempt
to turn aside the arm that wielded the knife.

But everything else was a blank.

Meanwhile, the countless shooting pains were merging into one
intolerable ache.  Brice had no desire to stir or even to open
his eyes.  The very thought of motion was abhorrent.  The mere
effort at thinking was painful.  So he lay still.

Presently, he was aware of something that touched his head.
And he wondered why the touch did not add to his hurt, but was
soothing.  Even a finger's weight might have been expected to
jar his battered skull.

But there was no jar to this touch.  Rather was it cooling and
of infinite comfort.  And now he realized that it had been
continuing for some time.

Again he roused his rebellious brain to action, and knew at
last what the soothing touch must be.  Some one was bathing
his forehead with cool water.  Some one with a lightly
magnetic touch.  Some one whose fingers held healing in their
soft tips.

And, just above him, he could hear quick, light breathing,
breathing that was almost a sob.  His unseen nurse was taking
her job not only seriously but compassionately.  That was
evident.  It did not jibe with Gavin's slight experience with
trained nurses.  Wherefore, it puzzled him.

But, perplexity seemed to hurt his brain as much as did the
effort to piece together the shattered fragments of memory.
So he forbore to follow that train of thought.  And, again, he
strove to banish mentality and to sink back into the merciful
senselessness from which youth and an iron-and-whalebone
constitution were fighting to rouse him.

But, do what he would to prevent it, consciousness was
creeping more and more in upon him.  For, now, he could not
only follow the motions of the wondrously gentle hand on his
forehead, but he could tell that his head was not on the
ground.  Instead, it was resting on something warm, and it
was elevated some inches above the grass.  He recalled a
war-chromo of a wounded soldier whose head rested on the knee
of a Red Cross nurse,--a nurse who sat on the furrowed earth
of a five-color battlefield, where all real life army
regulations forbade her to set foot.

Was he that soldier?  Was he still in the hell of the Flanders
trenches?  He had thought the war was over, and that he was
back in America,--in America and on his way South on some odd
and perilous business whose nature he could not now recall.

Another few seconds of mental wandering, and he was himself
again, his mind functioning more and more clearly.  With
returning strength of brain came curiosity.  Where was he?
How did he chance to be lying here, his head in some sobbing
woman's lap?  It didn't make sense!

With instinctive caution, he parted his eyelids, ever so
slightly, and sought to peer upward through his thick lashes.
The effort was painful, but less so than he had feared.
Already, through natural buoyancy or else by reason of the
unseen nurse's ministrations, the throbbing ache was becoming
almost bearable.

At first, his dazed eyes could make out nothing.  Then he
could see, through his lashes, the velvety dark blue of the
night sky and the big white Southern stars shining through a
soft cloud.  Inconsequentially, his vagrant mind recalled
that, below Miami, the Southern Cross is smudgily visible on
the horizon, somewhere around two in the morning.  And he
wondered if he could descry it, if that luminous cloud were
not in the way.

Then, he knew it was not a cloud which shimmered between his
eyes and the stars.  It was a woman's filmy hair.

And the woman was bending down above him, as he lay with his
head on her knee.  She was bending down, sobbing softly to
herself, and bathing his aching head with water from a bowl at
her side.

He was minded to rouse himself and speak, or at least to get a
less elusive look at her shadowed face, when running footsteps
sounded from somewhere.  And again by instinct, Brice shut his
eyes and lay moveless.

The footsteps were coming nearer.  They were springy and
rhythmic, the footsteps of a powerful man.

Then came a panting voice out of the darkness

"Oh, there you are!" it exclaimed.  "He got away.  Got away,
clean.  I reached the head of the path, not ten feet behind
him.  But, in there, it's so black I couldn't see anything
ahead of me.  And I had no light, worse luck!  So he--"

A deep-throated growl interrupted him,--a growl so fierce and
menacing that Gavin once more halfparted his eyes, in sudden
curiosity.

From beside his feet, Bobby Burns was rising.  The collie had
crouched there, evidently, with some idea of guarding Brice
from further harm.  He did not seem to have resented the
woman's ministrations.  But he was of no mind to let this man
come any closer to his stricken idol.

Brice was sore tempted to reach out his hand and give the
collie a reassuring pat and to thank him for the loyal guard
he had been keeping.  Now, through the mists of memory, he
recalled snarls and the bruising contact of a furry body,
during the battle he so, dimly remembered, and that once his
foe had cried, out, as though at the impact of rending teeth.

Yes, Bobby Burns, presumably, had learned a lesson since his
interested but impersonal surveillance of Gavin's bout with
the beach comber, earlier in the afternoon.  He had begun to
learn that when grown men come to a clinch, it is not mere
play.

And Brice wanted to praise the gallant young dog for coming
to his help.  But, as before, instinct and professional
experience bade him continue to "play dead."

"What's that?" he heard the man demand, in surprise, as Bobby
snarled again and stood threateningly between him and the
prostrate Brice.

The woman answered.  And at the first sound of her voice, full
memory rushed back on Gavin in a flood.  He knew where he was,
and who was holding, his head on her knee.  The knowledge
thrilled him, unaccountably.  With mighty effort he held to
his, pose of inert senselessness.

"That's Bobby Burns," he heard Claire saying in reply to her
brother's first question.  "He's guarding Mr. Brice.  When I
ran out here with the water and the cloths, I found him
standing above him.  But--oh, Milo--"

"Brice?" snapped Milo Standish, glowering on the fallen man
his sister was brooding over.  "Brice?  Who's Brice?  D'you
mean that chap?  Lucky I got him, even if the other one did
give me the slip!  Let me take a look at him.  If I hadn't
happened to be bringing the monkey-wrench from the garage to
fix that shelf-bolt in the study, I'd never have been able to
get even one of them.  I yanked free of them, while they were
trying to down me, and I let this one have it with the wrench.
Before I could land on the other--"

"Milo!" she broke in, after several vain attempts to still his
vainglorious recital.  "Milo!  You've injured--maybe you've
killed--the man who saved you from being stabbed to death!
Yet you--"

"What are you talking about?" he demanded, bewildered.  "These
two men set on me in the dark, as I was coming from--"

"This man, here--Mr. Brice--" she flamed, "has saved you from
being killed.  Oh, go and telephone for a doctor!  Quickly!
And send one of the maids out here with my smelling salts.
He--"

"Thanks!" returned her brother, making no move to obey.  "But
when I phone, it'll be to the police.  Not to a doctor.  I
don't know what notion you may have gotten of this fracas.
But--"

"Oh, we're wasting such precious time!" she cried.  "Listen!
I heard a shout.  I was on my way to the veranda to see what
was detaining you.  For I had heard your car come in, quite a
while before that.  I opened the door.  And I was just in time
to see some man spring on you, with a knife in his hand.  Then
Mr. Brice came running from the gateway, just as the man threw
you down and lifted his knife to stab you.  Mr. Brice dragged
him away from you and throttled him, and knocked the knife out
of his hand.  I could see it ever so plainly.  For it was all
in that big patch of light.  Just like a scene on a stage.
Then, Mr. Brice got to his feet, and swung the man to one
side, by the throat.  And as he did, you jumped up, too, and
hit him on the head with that miserable wrench.  As he fell, I
could see the other man stagger off toward the path.  He was
so weak, at first, he could hardly move.  I cried out to you,
but you were so busy glaring down at the man who had saved
your life that you didn't think to start after the other one
till he had gotten strength enough to escape from you.  Then I
went for water to--"

"Good Lord!" groaned Standish, agape.  "You're--you're
sure--dead sure you're right?"

"Sure?" she echoed, indignantly.  "Of course I'm sure.  I--"

"Hold that measly dog's collar," he broke in.  "So!  I don't
care to be bitten.  I've had my share of knockabout stuff, for
one day."

Stooping, he picked up Brice as easily as though Gavin had
been a baby, and with rough tenderness carried him toward the
house.

"There are a lot of things, about all this, that I don't
understand," he continued, irritably, as Claire and the still
growling but tight-held Bobby followed him to the veranda.
"For instance, how that dog happens to be here and trying to
protect a total stranger.  For, Bobby only got to Miami, from
New Jersey, by this morning's train.  He can't possibly know
this man.  That's one thing.  Another is, how this--Brice, did
you say his name is?--happened to be Johnny-on-the-spot when
the other chap tried to knife me.  And how you happen to know
him by name.  He's dressed more like a day-laborer than like
any one you'd be likely to meet ....  But all that can wait.
The thing now is to find how badly he's hurt."

They had reached the veranda, and Standish carried his burden
through an open doorway, which was blocked by a knot of
excitedly inquisitive servants.  A sharp word from Standish
sent them whisperingly back to the kitchen regions.  Milo laid
Brice down on a wicker couch in the broad, flagged hallway,
and ran his fingers over the bruised head.

Gavin could hear Claire, in a nearby room, telephoning.

"Hold on, there!" called Standish, as his sister gave the
operator a number.  "Wait!  As well as I can tell, at a
glance, there doesn't seem to be any fracture.  He's just
knocked out.  That's all.  A mild concussion of the brain, I
should think.  Don't call a doctor, unless it turns out to be
more serious.  It's bad enough for the servants to be all
stirred up like this, and to blab--as they're certain to--without
letting a doctor in on it, too.  The less talk we cause, the
better."

Reluctantly, Claire came away from the telephone and
approached the couch.

"You're sure?" she asked, in doubt.

"I've had some experience with this sort of thing, on the
other side," he answered.  "The man will come to himself in
another few minutes.  I've loosened his collar and belt and
shoelaces.  He--"

"Have you any idea who could have tried to kill you?" she
asked, shuddering.

"Yes!" he made sullen answer.  "And so have you.  Let it go at
that."

"You--you think it was one of--?"

"Hush!" he ordered, uneasily.  "This fellow may not be quite
as unconscious as he looks.  Sometimes, people get their
hearing back, before they open their eyes.  Come into the
library, a minute.  I want to speak to you.  Oh, don't look
like that, about leaving him alone!  He'll be all right, I
tell you!  His pulse is coming back, strong.  Come in here."

He laid one big arm on her slight shoulder and led her,
half-forcibly, into the adjoining room.  Thence, Gavin could
hear the rumble of his deep voice.  But he could catch no word
the man said, though once he heard Claire speak in vehement
excitement, and could hear Milo's harsh interruption and his
command that she lower her voice.


Presently, the two came back into the hall.  As Standish
neared the couch, Gavin Brice opened his eyes, with
considerable effort, and blinked dazedly up at the gigantic
figure in the torn and muddy white silk suit.

Then Brice's blinking gaze drifted to Claire, as she stood,
pale and big-eyed, above him.  He essayed a feeble smile of
recognition, and let his glance wander in well-acted amazement
about the high-veiled hallway.

"Feeling better?" queried Milo.  "Here, drink this."

Gavin essayed to speak.  His pose was not wholly assumed.  For
his head still swam and was intolerably painful.

He sipped at the brandy which Standish held to his sagging
lips.  And, glancing toward Claire, he smiled, a somewhat
wavery and wan smile.

"Don't try to say anything!" she begged.  "Wait till you are
feeling better."

"I'm I'm all right," he assured her, albeit rather shakily,
his voice seeming to come from a distance.  "I got a rap over
the head.  And it put me out, for a while.  But--I'm
collecting the pieces.  I'll be as good as--as new, in a few
minutes."

The fragments of dialogue between brother and sister had
supplemented his returning memory.  Mentally, he was himself
again, keen, secretive, alert, every bit of him warily on
guard.  But he cursed the fact that Standish had drawn Claire
into the library, out of earshot, when he spoke of the man who
had attacked him.

Then, with a queer revulsion of feeling, he cursed himself for
an eavesdropper, and was ashamed of having listened at all.
For the first time, he began to hate the errand that had
brought him to Florida.

Bobby Burns caused a mild diversion, as Brice's voice trailed
away.  At Gavin's first word, the collie sprang from his
self-appointed guard-post at the foot of the couch, and came
dancing up to the convalescent man, thrusting his cold nose
rapturously against Brice's face, trying to lick his cheek,
whimpering in joy at his idol's recovery.

With much effort Gavin managed to stroke the wrigglingly
active head, and to say a reassuring word to his worshiper.
Then, glancing again at Claire, he explained:

"I'd done about a mile toward Miami when he overtook me.
There was no use in trying to send him home.  So I brought
him.  Just as we got to the gate, here--"

"I know," intervened Claire, eager to spare him the effort of
speech.  "I saw.  It was splendid of you, Mr. Brice!  My
brother and I are in your debt for more than we can ever hope
to pay."

"Nonsense!" he protested.  "I made a botch of the whole thing.
I ought--"

"No," denied Milo.  "It was I who made a botch of it.  I owe
you not only my life but an apology.  It was my blow, not the
other man's, that knocked you out.  I misunderstood, and--"

"That's all right!" declared Gavin.  "In the dim light it's a
miracle we didn't all of us slug the wrong men.  I--"

He stopped.  Claire had been working over something on a table
behind him.  Now she came forward with a cold compress for his
abraded scalp.  Skillfully, she applied it, her dainty fingers
wondrously deft.

"Red Cross?" asked Brice, as she worked.

"Just a six-month nursing course, during the war," she said,
modestly, adding: "I didn't get across."

"I'm sorry," said Gavin.  "I mean, for the poor chaps who
might have profited by such clever bandaging ....  Yes, that's
a very dull and heavy compliment.  I know it.  But--there's a
lot of gratitude behind it.  You've made this throbbing old
head of mine feel ever so much better, Miss Standish."

Milo was looking bewilderedly from one to the other, as if
trying to understand how this ill-clad man chanced to be on
such terms of acquaintanceship with his fastidious little
sister.  Claire read his look of inquiry, and said:

"Mr. Brice found Bobby Burns, this afternoon, and brought him
home to me.  It was nice of him, wasn't it?  For it took him
ever so far out of his way."

Gavin noted that she made no mention of his having come to the
Standish home by way of the hidden path.  It seemed to him
that she gave him a glance of covert appeal, as though
beseeching him not to mention it.  He nodded, ever so
slightly, and took up the narrative, as she paused for words.

"I saw Miss Standish and yourself, at Miami, this morning,"
said he, "and the collie, here, on the back seat of your car.
Then, this afternoon, as I was walking out in this direction,
I saw the dog again.  I recognized him, and I guessed he had
strayed.  So he and I made friends.  And as we were strolling
along together, we met Miss Standish.  At least, I met her.
Bobby met a prematurely gray Persian cat, with the dreamy
Bagdad name of 'Simon Cameron.'  By the time the dog and cat
could be sorted out from each other--"

"Oh, I see!" laughed Milo.  "And I don't envy you the job of
sorting them.  It was mighty kind of you to--"

He broke off and added, with a tinge of anxiety:

"You say you happened to be walking near here.  Are you a
neighbor of ours?"

"Not yet," answered Gavin, with almost exaggerated simplicity.
"But I was hoping to be.  You see I was out looking for a job
in this neighborhood."

"A job?" repeated Milo, then, suspiciously: "Why in this
neighborhood, rather than any other?  You say you were at
Miami--"

"Because this chanced to be the neighborhood I was wandering
in," replied Gavin.  "As I explained to Miss Standish, I'd
rather do some kind of outdoor work.  Preferably farm work.
That's why I left Miami.  There seemed to be lots of farms and
groves, hereabouts."

"Yet you were on your way back toward Miami, when Bobby
overtook you?  Rather a long walk, for--"

"A long walk," gravely agreed Brice.  "But safer sleeping
quarters when one gets there.  Up North, one can take a
chance, and sleep in the open, almost anywhere except on a
yellow-jacket's nest.  Down here, I've heard, rattlesnakes are
apt to stray in upon one's slumbers.  Out in the country, at
least.  There aren't any rattlesnakes in the Royal Palm's
gardens.  Besides, there's music, and there's the fragrance of
night jasmine.  Altogether, it's worth the difference of ten
or twelve miles of tramping."

"You're staying at the Royal Palm, then?"

"Near it," corrected Brice.  "To be exact, in the darkest
corner of its big gardens.  The turf is soft and springy.  The
solitude is perfect, too--unless some nightwatchman gets too
vigilant."

He spoke lightly, even airily, through his pain and weakness.
But, as before, his every faculty was on guard.  A born and
trained expert in reading human nature, he felt this giant
somehow suspected him and was trying to trap him in an
inaccuracy.  Wherefore, he fenced, verbally, calmly confident
he could outpoint his clumsier antagonist.

"You don't look like the kind of man who need sleep out of
doors," replied Standish, speaking slowly, as one who chooses
his every word with care, and with his cold blue eyes
unobtrusively scanning Gavin's battered face.  "That's the
bedroom for bums.  You aren't a bum.  Even if your manner, and
the way you fought out yonder, didn't prove that.  A bum
doesn't walk all this way and back, on a hot day, unless for a
handout.  And you--"

"But a handout is just what I asked for," Gavin caught him up.
"When I brought Bobby Burns back I traded on the trifling
little service by asking Miss Standish if I could get a job
here.  It was impertinent of me, I know.  And I was sorry as
soon as I'd done it.  But she told me, in effect, that you
were 'firing, not hiring.' So I--"

"Why did you want a job with me?" insisted Standish.  "Rather
than with any of a dozen farmers or country house people along
here?"

And, this time, any fool could have read the stark suspicion
in his tone and in the hard blue eyes.

"For several reasons," said Brice, coolly.  "In the
first place, I had brought home your dog.  In the second, I
had taken a fancy to him, as he had to me, and it would be
pleasant working at a place where I could be with such a chum.
In the third place, Miss Standish was kind enough to say
pretty much the same things about me that you've just said.
She knew I wasn't a tramp, who might be expected to decamp
with the lawn-mower or the spoons.  Another landowner might
not have been so complimentary, when I applied for work and
had no references.  In the fourth, you seem to have a larger
and more pretentious place here than most of your near
neighbors.  I--I can't think of any better reasons, just now."

"H'm!" mused Standish, frowning down on the recumbent man, and
then looking across in perplexity at Claire.

What he read in the girl's eyes seemed to shame him, just a
little.  For, as he turned back to Gavin, there was an
apologetic aspect on his bearded face.  Brice decided to force
the playing.  Before his host could speak or Claire could
interfere, he rose to a sitting position, with some effort and
more pain, and, clutching the head of the couch, lurched to
his feet.

"No, no!" called Claire, running forward to support him as he
swayed a bit.  "Don't try to stand!  Lie down again!  You're
as white as a ghost."

But Gavin drew courteously away from her supporting arm and
faced Milo.

"I can only thank you," said he, "for patching me up so well.
I'm a lot better, now.  And I've a long way to go.  So, I'll
be starting.  Thanks, again, both of you.  I'm sorry to have
put you to so much bother."  He reeled, cleverly, caught at
the couch-head again, and took an uncertain step toward the
door.  But now, not only Claire but her brother barred his
way.

"Don't be an idiot!" stormed Milo.  "Why, man, you couldn't
walk a hundred yards, with that groggy head on your shoulders!
You're all beaten up.  You'll be lucky if you're on your feet
in another three days.  What sort of cur do you think I am, to
let you go like this, after all you've done for me, to-night?
You'll stay with us till to-morrow, anyhow.  And then, if you
still insist on going back to Miami, I'll take you there in
the car.  But you're not going a step from here, to-night.
I--"

Gavin strove to mutter a word of disclaimer, to take another
wavering stride toward the front door.  But his knees gave
away under him.  He swayed forward, and must have fallen, had
not Milo Standish caught him.

"Here," Milo bade his sister, as he laid the limp body back on
the couch.  "Go and tell the maids to get the gray room ready
as quickly as possible.  I'll carry him up there.  It was
rotten of me to go on catechizing him, like that, and letting
him see he was unwelcome.  But for him, I'd be--"

"Yes," answered Claire, over her shoulder, as she hurried on
her errand.  "It was 'rotten.'  And more than that.  I kept
trying to signal you to stop.  You'll you'll give him work,
here, won't you, please?"

"We'll talk about that, afterward," he said, ungraciously.  "I
suppose it's the only thing a white man can do, after the chap
risked his life for me, to-night.  But I'd rather give him ten
times his wages--money to get out and keep out."

"Thanks, neighbor!" said Brice, to himself, from the depths of
his stage-faint.  "I've no doubt you would.  But the cards are
running the other way."

Again, his eyes apparently shut, he watched through slitted
lids the progress of Claire, as she passed out of the hall,
toward the kitchen quarters.  She was leading the reluctant
Bobby Burns away, by the collar.  Standish was just behind
her, and had his back turned to Gavin.  But he glanced at him,
suddenly, over his shoulder, and then strode swiftly forward
to close the door which Claire had left open behind her on her
way to the kitchen wing of the house.

Something in the big man's action aroused in Brice the mystic
sixth sense he had been at much pains to develop,--a sense
which often enabled him to guess instinctively at an opponent's
next probable move.  As Milo took his first step toward the open
door, Brice went into action.

Both hands slipped into his pockets, and out again.  As he
withdrew them, one hand held his battered but patently solid
gold watch.  The other gripped his roll of bills and as much
of his small change as he had been able to scoop up in one
rapid grab.

On the stand at the head of the couch reposed a fat tobacco
jar and pipes.  The jar was more than half full.  Into it,
Gavin Brice dumped his valuables, and with a clawing motion,
scraped a handful of loose tobacco over them.  Then he
returned to his former inertly supine posture.

The whole maneuver had not occupied three seconds.  And, by
the time Standish had the door closed and had started back
toward the couch, the watch and money were safe-hidden.  At
that, there had been little enough time to spare.  It had been
a matter of touch-and-go.  Nothing but the odd look he had
read in Milo's face as Standish had glanced at him over his
shoulder, would have led Brice to take such a chance.  But,
all at once, it had seemed a matter of stark necessity.

The narrow escape from detection set his strained nerves to
twitching.  He muttered to himself:

"Come along then, you man-mountain!  You wanted to get your
sister out of the way, so you could go through my clothes and
see if I was lying about being flat broke and if I had any
incriminating papers on me.  Come along, and search!  If I
hadn't brains enough to fool a chucklehead, like you, I'd go
out of the business and take in back-stairs to clean!"

Milo was approaching the couch, moving with a stealthy
lightness, unusual in so large a man.  Leaning over the
supposedly unconscious Gavin, he ran his fingers deftly
through Brice's several pockets.  In only two was he lucky to
find anything.

From a trousers pocket he exhumed seventy-eight cents.  From
the inner pocket of the coat he extracted a card, postmarked
"New York City," and addressed to "Gavin Brice, General
Delivery, Miami, Florida."  The postcard was inscribed, in a
scrawling hand:

"Good time and good luck and good health to you, from us all.
Jack O'G."

Gavin knew well the contents of the card, having written it
and mailed it to himself on the eve of his departure from the
North.  It was as mild and noncommittal a form of
identification as he could well have chosen.

Standish read the banal message on the soiled card, then
restored cash and postal to their respective pockets.  After
which he stood frowning down in puzzled conjecture on the
moveless Gavin.

"Well, old chap!" soliloquized Brice.  "If that evidence
doesn't back up all I said about myself, nothing will.  But,
for the Lord's sake, don't help yourself to a pipeful of
tobacco, till I have time to plant the loot deeper in the
jar!"

He heard the light footfalls of women, upstairs, where Claire,
in person, seemed to be superintending the arrangement of his
room.  At the sound, a twinge of compunction swept Brice.
But, at memory of her brother's stealthy ransacking of an
unconscious guest's clothes, the feeling passed, leaving only
a warm battlethrill.

Drowsily, he opened his eyes, and stared with blank wonder up
at Milo.  Then, shamefacedly, he mumbled:

"I--I hope I wasn't baby enough to--to keel over, Mr.
Standish?"

"That's all right," answered Milo.  "It was my fault.  I was a
boor.  And, very rightly, you decided you didn't care to stay
any longer under my roof.  But your strength wasn't up to your
spirit.  So you fainted.  I want to apologize for speaking as
I did.  I'm mighty grateful to you, for your service to me,
this evening.  And my sister and I want you to stay on here,
for the present.  When you're feeling more like yourself,
we'll have a chat about that job.  I think we can fix it, all
right.  Nothing big, of course.  Nothing really worth your
while.  But it may serve as a stopgap, till you get a chance
to look around you."

"If nothing better turns up," suggested Brice, with a weak
effort at lightness, "you might hire me as a bodyguard."

"As a--a what?" snapped Milo, in sharp suspicion, the
geniality wiped from face and voice with ludicrous suddenness.
"A--?"

"As a bodyguard," repeated Gavin, not seeming to note the
change in his host.  "If you're in the habit of being set
upon, often, as you were, this evening you'll be better off
with a good husky chap to act as-"

"Oh, that?" scoffed Milo, in ponderous contempt.  "That was
just some panhandler, who thought he might knock me over, from
behind, and get my watch and wallet.  The same thing isn't
likely to happen again in a century.  Florida is the most
law-abiding State in the Union.  And Dade County is perhaps
the most law-abiding part of Florida.  One would need a
bodyguard in New York City, more than here.  There have been a
lot of holdups there."

Gavin did not reply.  His silence seemed to annoy Milo who
burst forth again, this time with a tinge of open amusement in
his contempt:

"Besides--even if there were assassins lurking behind every
bunch of palmetto scrub, in the county--do you honestly think
a man of your size could do very much toward protecting me?
I'm not bragging.  But I'm counted one of the strongest men
in--"

"To-night," said Brice, drily, "I managed to be of some slight
use.  Pardon my mentioning it.  If I hadn't been there, you'd
be carrying eight inches of cold steel, between your shoulders.
And--pardon me, again--if you'd had the sense to stay out of
the squabble a second or so longer, the man who tackled you
would be either in jail or in the morgue, by this time.  I'm
not oversized.  But neither is a stick of dynamite.   An
automatic pistol isn't anywhere as big as an old-fashioned
blunderbuss.  But it can outshoot and outkill the blunderbuss,
with very little bother.  Think it over.  And, while you're
thinking, stop to think, also, that a 'panhandler' doesn't do
his work with a knife.  He doesn't try to stab a man to death,
for the sake of the few dollars the victim may happen to have
in his pockets.  That sort of thing calls for pluck and iron
nerves and physical strength.  If a panhandler had those, he
wouldn't be a panhandler.  Any more than that chap, to-night,
was a panhandler.  My idea of acting as a bodyguard for you
isn't bad.  Think it over.  You seem to need one."

"Why do you say that?" demanded Milo, in one of his recurrent
flashes of suspicion.

"Because," said Gavin, "we're living in the twentieth century
and in real life, not in the dark ages and in a dime novel.
Nowadays, a man doesn't risk capital punishment, lightly, for
the fun of springing on a total stranger, in the dark, with a
razor-edge knife.  Mr. Standish, no man does a thing like that
to a stranger, or without some mighty motive.  It is no
business of mine to ask that motive or to horn in on your
private affairs.  And I don't care to.  But, from your looks,
you're no fool.  You know, as well as I do, that that was no
panhandler or even a highwayman.  It was an enemy whose motive
for wanting to murder you, silently and surely, was strong
enough to make him willing to risk death or capture.  Now,
when you say you don't need a bodyguard--Well, it's your own
business, of course.  Let it go at that, if you like."

Long and silently Milo Standish looked down at the nonchalant
invalid.  Above, the sounds of women's steps and an occasional
snatch of a sentence could be heard.  At last, Milo spoke.

"You are right," said he, very slowly, and as if measuring his
every word.  "You are right.  There are one or two men who
would like to get this land and this house and--and other
possessions of mine.  There is no reason for going into
particulars that wouldn't interest you.  Take my word.  Those
reasons are potent.  I have reason to suspect that the assault
on me, this evening, is concerned with their general plan to
get rid of me.  Perhaps--perhaps you're right, about my need
of a bodyguard.  Though it's a humiliating thing for a grown
man--especially a man of my size and strength--to confess.
We'll talk it over, tomorrow, if you are well enough."

Brice nodded, absently, as if wearied with the exertion of
their talk.  His eyes had left Milo's, and had concentrated on
the man's big and hairy hands.  As Milo spoke of the
supposititious criminals who desired his possessions enough to
do murder for them, his fists clenched, tightly.  And to
Brice's memory came a wise old adage:

"When you think a man is lying to you, don't watch his face.
Any poker-player can make his face a mask.  Watch his hands.
Ten to one, if he is lying, he'll clench them."

Brice noted the tightening of the heavy fists.  And he was
convinced.  Yet, he told himself, in disgust, that even a
child of six would scarce have needed such confirmation that
the clumsily blurted tale was a lie.

He nodded again, as Milo looked at him with a shade of
anxiety.

The momentary silence was broken by footsteps on the stairs.
Claire was descending.  Brice gathered his feet under him and
sat upright.  It was easier, now, to do this, and his head had
recovered its feeling of normality, though it still ached
ferociously.

At the same instant, through the open doorway, from across the
lawn in the direction of the secret path, came the quaveringly
sweet trill of a mocking bird's song.  Despite himself,
Gavin's glance turned toward the doorway.

"That's just a mocker," Milo explained, loudly, his face
reddening as he looked in perturbation at his guest.  "Sweet,
isn't he?  They often sing, off and on, for an hour or two
after dark."

"I know they do," said Gavin (though he did not say it aloud).
"But in Florida, the very earliest mocking bird doesn't sing
till around the first of March.  And this isn't quite the
middle of February.  There's not a mocking bird on the
Peninsula that is singing, yet.  The very dulcet whistler, out
yonder, ought to make a closer study of ornithology.  He--"

Brice's unspoken thought was shattered.  For, unnoticed by
him, Milo Standish had drawn forth, with tender care, an
exquisitely carved and colored meerschaum pipe from a case on
the smoking-stand, and was picking up the fat tobacco jar.




CHAPTER IV

THE STRANGER FROM NOWHERE


For a moment, Brice stared agape and helplessly flustered, as
Standish proceeded to thrust his meerschaum's rich-hued bowl
into the tobacco jar.  Then, apparently galvanized into action
by the approach of Claire from the stairway, he stepped
rapidly forward to meet her.

As though his shaky powers were not equal to the task he
reeled, lurched with all his might against the unprepared
Standish and, to regain his balance, took two plunging steps
forward.

He had struck Milo at such an angle as to rap the latter's
right elbow with a numbing force that sent the pipe flying
half way across the hall.  The tobacco jar must have gone too,
had not one of Gavin's outflung hands caught it in mid-air, as
a quarterback might catch a football.

Unable to recover balance and to check his own momentum.
Brice scrambled awkwardly forward.  One stamping heel landed
full on the fallen meerschaum, flattening and crumbling the
beautiful pipe into a smear of shapeless clay-fragments.

At the sight.  Milo Standish swore loudly and came charging
forward in a belated hope of saving his beloved pipe from
destruction.  The purchase of that meerschaum had been a joy
to Milo.  Its coloring had been a long and careful process.
And now, this bungler had smashed it into nothingness!

Down on hands and knees went the big man, fumbling at the
fragments.  Claire, knowing how her brother valued the pipe,
ran to his side in eager sympathy.

Gavin Brice came to a sliding standstill against a heavy
hall-table.  On this he leaned heavily for a moment or so
above the tobacco jar he had so luckily salvaged from the
wreckage.  His back to the preoccupied couple he flashed his
sensitive fingers into the jar, collecting and thrusting into
his pockets the watch and the thick roll of bills and as much
of the small change as his fast-groping fingertips could
locate.

By the time Milo looked up in impotent wrath from his
inspection of the ruined meerschaum.  Gavin had turned toward
him and was babbling a torrent of apology for his own
awkwardness.  Milo was glumly silent as the contrite words
beat about his ears.  But Claire, shamed by her brother's
ungraciousness, spoke up courteously to relieve the visitor's
dire embarrassment.

"Please don't be unhappy about it.  Mr. Brice," she begged.
"It was just an accident.  It couldn't be helped.  I'm sure my
brother--"

"But--" stammered Gavin.

"Oh, it's all right!" grumbled Milo, scooping up the handful
of crushed meerschaum.  "Let it go at that.
I--"

Again, the mocking bird notes fluted forth through the early
evening silences, the melody coming as before from the
direction of the grove's hidden path.  Milo stopped short in
his sulky speech.  Brother and sister exchanged a swift
glance.  Then Standish got to his feet and approached Gavin.

"Here we've kept you up and around when you're still too weak
to move without help!" he said in very badly done geniality.
"Take my arm and I'll help you upstairs.  Your room's all
ready for you.  If you'd rather I can carry you.  How about
it?"

But a perverse imp of mischief entered Gavin Brice's aching
head.

"I'm all right now," he protested.  "I feel fifty per cent
better.  I'd much rather stay down here with you and Miss
Standish for a while, if you don't mind.  My nerves are a bit
jumpy from that crack over the skull, and I'd like them to
quiet down before I go to bed."

Again, he was aware of that look of covert anxiety, between
sister and brother.  Claire's big eyes strayed involuntarily
toward the front door.  And her lips parted for some word of
urgence.  But before she could speak, Milo laughed loudly and
caught Gavin by the arm.

"You've got pluck, Brice!" he cried admiringly.  "You're
ashamed to give up and go to bed.  But you're going just the
same.  You're going to get a good night's rest.  I don't
intend to have you fall sick from that tap I gave you with
the wrench.  Come on!  I'll bring you some fresh dressings for
your head by the time you're undressed."

As he talked he passed one huge arm around Gavin and carried,
rather than led, him to the stairway.

"Good night, Mr. Brice," called Claire from near the doorway.
"I do hope your head will be ever so much better in the
morning.  If you want anything in the night, there's a
call-bell I've put beside your bed."

Once more a dizzy weakness seemed to have overcome Gavin.  For
after a single attempt at resistance, he swayed and hung
heavy on Standish's supporting arm.  He made shift to mumble a
dazed good night to Claire.  Then he suffered Milo to support
him up the stairs and along the wide upper hall to the open
doorway of a bedroom.

Even at the threshold he seemed too uncertain of his footing
to cross the soft-lit room alone.  And Milo supported him to
the bed.  Gavin slumped heavily upon the side of it, his
aching head in his hands.  Then, as if with much effort, he
lay down, burying his face in the pillow.

Milo had been watching him with growing impatience to be gone.
Now he said cheerily:

"That's all right, old chap!  Lie still for a while.  I'll be
up in a few minutes to help you undress."

Standish was hurrying from the room and closing the door
behind him, even as he spoke.  With the last word the door
shut and Gavin could hear the big man's footsteps hastening
along the upper hall toward the stair-head.

Brice gave him a bare thirty seconds' start.  Then, rising
with strange energy for so dazed and broken an invalid, he
left the room and followed him toward the head of the stairs.
His light footfall was soundless on the matting as he went.

He reached the top of the stairs just as Milo arrived at the
bottom.  Claire was standing in the veranda doorway shading
her eyes and peering out into the darkness.  But at sound of
her brother's advancing tread she turned and ran back to him,
meeting him as he reached the bottom of the stair and clasping
both hands anxiously about his big forearm.

She seemed about to break out in excited, even frightened
speech, when chancing to raise her eyes, she saw Gavin Brice
calmly descending from the hall above.  At sight of him her
eyes dilated.  Milo had begun to speak.  She put one hand
warningly across her brother's bearded mouth.  At the same
moment Gavin, halting midway on the stairs, said with
deprecatory meekness:

"You didn't tell me what time to be ready for breakfast.  I'd
hate to be late and--"

He got no further.  Nor did he seek to.  His ears had been
straining to make certain of the ever approaching sound of
footsteps across the lawn.  Now an impatient tread echoed on
the veranda, and a man's figure blocked the doorway.

The newcomer was slender, graceful, with the form of an
athletic boy rather than of a mature man.  He was pallid and
black eyed.  His face had a classic beauty which, on second
glance, was marred by an almost snakelike aspect of the small
black eyes and a sinister smile which seemed to hover
eternally around the thin lips.  His whole bearing suggested
something serpentine in its grace and a smoothly half-jesting
deadliness.

So much the first glimpse told Brice as he stood there on the
stairs and surveyed the doorway.  The second look showed him
the man was clad in a strikingly ornate yachting costume.
Gavin's mind, ever taught to dissect trifles, noted that in
spite of his yachtsman-garb the stranger's face was untanned,
and that his long slender hands with their supersensitive
fingers were as white and well-cared-for as a woman's.

Yachting, in Florida waters at any time of year, means either
a thick coat of tan or an exaggerated sunburn.  This yachtsman
had neither.

Scarce taller than a lad of fifteen, yet his slender figure was
sinuous in its every line, and its grace betokened much wiry
strength.  His face was that of a man in the early
thirties,--all but his eyes.  They looked as old as the
Sphinx's.

He stood for an instant peering into the room, trying to focus
his night-accustomed eyes to the light.  Evidently the first
objects he saw clearly were Milo and Claire standing with
their backs to him as they stared upward in blank dismay at
the guest they had thought safely disposed of for the night.

"Well?" queried the man at the door, and at sound of his
silken, bantering voice, brother and sister spun
about in surprise, to face him.

"Well?" he repeated, and now there was a touch of cold rebuke
in the silken tones.  "Is this the way you keep a lookout for
the signals?  I might very well have walked in on a convention
of half of Dade County, for all the guard that was kept.  I
compliment--"

And now he broke off short in his sneering reproof, as his
eyes chanced upon Gavin half way down the stairs.

For a second or more no one spoke or moved.  Claire and her
brother had an absurdly shamefaced appearance of two bad
children caught in mischief by a stern and much feared teacher.
Into the black depths of the stranger's eyes flickered a
sudden glint like that of a striking rattlesnake's.  But at
once his face was a slightly-smiling mask once more.  And
Gavin was left doubting whether or not he had really seen that
momentary gleam of murder behind the smiling eyes.  It was
Claire who first recovered herself.

"Good evening, Rodney," she said, with a graciousness which
all-but hid her evident nerve strain.  "You stole in on us so
suddenly you startled me.  Mr. Brice, this is Mr. Rodney
Hade."

As Gavin bowed civilly and as Hade returned the salutation
with his eternal smile.  Milo Standish came sufficiently out
of his own shock of astonishment to follow his sister's mode
of greeting the new visitor.  With the same forced joviality
he had used in coercing Brice to go to bed, he sauntered over
to the smiling Hade, exclaiming:

"Why, hello, old man!  Where did you blow in from?  You must
have come across from your house on foot.  I didn't hear the
car ....  I want you to know Brice here.  I was tackled by a
holdup man outside yonder a while ago.  And he'd have gotten
me too, if Brice hadn't sailed into him.  In the scrimmage I
made a fool of myself as usual, and slugged the wrong man with
a monkey wrench.  Poor Brice's reward for saving my life was
a broken head.  He's staying the night with us.  He--"

The big man had spoken glibly, but with a nervousness which,
more and more, cropped out through his noisy joviality.  Now,
under the coldly unwavering smile of Hade's snakelike eyes, he
stammered, and his booming voice trailed away to a mumble.
Again, Claire sought to mend the rickety situation.  But now
Gavin Brice forestalled her.  Passing one hand over his
bandaged forehead, he said:

"If you'll forgive me having butted in again.  I'll go up to
my room.  I'm pretty shaky, you see.  I just wanted to know
what time breakfast is to be, and if I can borrow one of your
brother's razors in the morning."

"Breakfast is at seven o'clock," answered Claire.  "That's a
barbarously early hour, I suppose for a New Yorker like you.
But down here from six to ten is the glorious part of the day.
Besides, we're farmers you know.  Don't bother to try to wake
so early, please.  I'll have your breakfast sent up to you.
Good night."

"I'll look in on you before I go to bed," called Milo after
him as he started up the stairs for the second time.  "And
I'll see that shaving things are left in your bathroom.  Good
night."

Hade said nothing, but continued to pierce the unbidden guest
with those gimlet-like smiling black eyes of his.  His face
was expressionless.  Gavin returned to the upper hall and
walked with needless heaviness toward the room assigned to
him.  Reaching its door he opened and then shut it loudly,
himself remaining in the hallway.  Scarce had the door slammed
when he heard from below Rodney Hade's voice raised in the
sharp question:

"What does this mean?  You've dared to--?"

"What the blazes else could I do?" blustered Milo--though
under the bluster ran a thread of placating timidity.  "He
saved my life, didn't he?  I was tackled by--"

"For one thing," suggested Hade, "you could have hit a little
harder with the wrench.  If a blow is worth hitting at all
it's worth hitting to kill.  You have the strength of an
elephant, and the nerve of a sheep."

"Rodney!" protested Claire, indignantly.  "He--"

"I've seen his face somewhere," went on Hade unheeding.  "I
could swear to that.  I can't place it yet.  But I shall.
Meantime get rid of him.  And now I'll hear about this attack
on you ....  Come out on the veranda.  This hall reeks of
iodine and liniment and all such stuff.  It smells like a
hospital ward.  Come outside."

Despite the unvarying sweet smoothness of his diction, he
spoke as if giving orders to a servant.  But apparently
neither of the two Standishes resented his
dictation.  For Brice could hear them follow Hade out of the
house.  And from the veranda presently came the booming murmur
of Standish's voice in a recital of some kind.

Gavin reopened his bedroom door and entered.  Shutting the
door softly behind him, he made a brief mental inventory of
the room, then undressed and got into bed.  Ten minutes later
Miles Standish came into the room, carrying fresh dressings
and a bottle of lotion.  Gavin roused himself from a half-doze
and was duly grateful for the dexterous applying of the new
bandages to his bruised scalp.

"You work like a surgeon," he told Milo.

"Thanks," returned Standish drily, making no other comment on
the praise.

His task accomplished Standish bade his guest a curt good
night and left the room.  A minute later Gavin got up and
stole to the door to verify a faint sound he fancied he had
heard.  And he found he had been correct in his guess.  For
the door was locked from the outside.

Brice crept to the windows.  The room was in darkness, and,
unseen, he could look out on the darkness of the night.  As he
looked a faint reddish spot of fire appeared in the gloom,
just at the beginning of the lawn.  Some one, cigar in mouth,
was evidently keeping a watch on his room's windows.  Gavin
smiled to himself, and went back to bed.

"Door locked, windows guarded," he reflected, amusedly.  "I
owe that to Mr. Hade's orders.  Seen me before, has he?  I'll
bet my year's income he'll never remember where or when or
how.  At that he's clever even to think he's seen me.  It
looks as if I had let myself in for a wakeful time down here,
doesn't it?  But I'm getting the tangled ends all in my
hands,--as fast as I had any right to hope.  That rap on the
skull was a godsend.  He can't refuse me a job after my fight
for him.  No one could.  I--oh, if it wasn't for the girl
this would be great!  What can a girl, with eyes like hers, be
doing in a crowd like this?

"I'd--I'd have been willing to swear she was--was--one of the
women whom God made.  And now--!  Still, if a woman lets
herself in for this kind of thing she can't avoid paying the
bill.  Only--if I can save her without-- Oh, I'm turning into
a mushy fool in my old age! ...  And she sobbed when she
thought I was killed! ... I've got to get a real night's rest
if I want to have my wits about me to-morrow."

He stretched himself out luxuriously in the cool bed, and in
less than five minutes he was sleeping as sweetly and as
deeply as a child.  Long experience in the European trenches
and elsewhere had taught him the rare gift of slumbering at
will, a gift which had done much toward keeping his nerves and
his faculties in perfect condition.  For sleep is the keynote
to more than mankind realizes.


The sun had risen when Gavin Brice awoke.  Apart from
stiffness and a very sore head his inured system was little
the worse for the evening's misadventures.  A cold shower and
a rubdown and a shave in the adjoining bathroom cleared away
the last mists from his brain.

He dressed quickly, glanced at his watch and saw the hour was
not quite seven.  Then he faced his bedroom door and
hesitated.

"If he's a born idiot," he mused, "it's still locked.  If he
isn't it's unlocked and the key has been taken away.  I've
made noise enough while I was dressing."

He turned the knob.  The door opened readily.  The key was
gone.  In the hallway outside the room and staring up at him
from widely shallow green eyes, sat Simon Cameron, the big
Persian cat.

"That's a Persian all over.  Simon my friend," said Brice,
stooping down to scratch the cat's furry head in greeting.  "A
Persian will sit for hours in front of any door that's got a
stranger behind it.  And he'll show more flattering affection
for a stranger than for any one he's known all his life.
Isn't that true.  Simon?"

By way of response, the big cat rubbed himself luxuriously
against the man's shins, purring loudly.  Then, at a single
lithe spring he was on Gavin's shoulder, making queer little
whistling noises and rubbing his head lovingly against Brice's
cheek.  Gavin made his way downstairs the cat still clinging
to his shoulder, fanning his face with a swishing gray foxlike
tail, digging curved claws back and forth into the cloth of
his shabby coat, and purring like a distant railroad train.

Only when they reached the lower hallway did the cat jump from
his shoulder and with a flying leap land on the top of a
nearby bookcase.  There, luxuriously,
Simon Cameron stretched himself out in a shaft of sunlight,
and prepared for a nap.

Brice went on to the veranda.  On the lawn, scarce fifty feet
away, Claire was gathering flowers for the breakfast table.
Very sweet and dainty was she in the flood of morning
sunshine, her white dress and her burnished hair giving back
waves of radiance from the sun's strong beams.

At her side walked Bobby Burns.  But, on first sound of
Brice's step on the porch, the collie looked up and saw him.
With a joyous bark of welcome Bobby came dashing across the
lawn and up the steps.  Leaping and gamboling around Gavin.
he set the echoes ringing with a series of trumpet-barks.  The
man paused to pet his adorer and to say a word of
friendliness, then ran down the steps toward Claire who was
advancing to meet him.  Her arms were full of scarlet and
golden blossoms.

"Are you better?" she called, noting the bandage on his head
had been replaced by a neat strip of plaster.  "I hoped you'd
sleep longer.  Bobby Burns ran up to your room and scratched
at the door as soon as I let him into the house this morning.
But I made him come away again.  Are--"

"He left a worthy substitute welcoming-committee  there, in
the shape of Simon Cameron," said Gavin.  "Simon was
overwhelmingly cordial to me, for a Persian .... I'm all right
again, thanks," he added.  "I had a grand night's rest.  It
was fine to sleep in a real bed again.  I hope I'm not late
for breakfast?"

A shade of embarrassment flitted over her eyes, and she made
answer:

"My brother had to go into Miami on--on business.  So he had
breakfast early.  He'll hardly be back before noon he says.
So you and I will have to breakfast without him.  I hope you
don't mind?"


As there seemed no adequate reply to this useless question.
the man contented himself with following her wordlessly into
the cool house.  She seemed to bring light and youth and
happiness indoors with her, and the armful of flowers she
carried filled the dim hallway with perfume.

Breakfast was a simple meal and soon eaten.  Brice brought to
it only a moderate appetite, and was annoyed to find his
thoughts centering themselves about the slender white-clad
girl across the table from him, rather than upon his food or
even upon his plan of campaign.  He replied in monosyllables
to her pleasant table-talk, and when his eye chanced to meet
hers he had an odd feeling of guilt.

She was so pretty, so little, so young, so adorably friendly
and innocent in her every look and word!  Something very like
a heartache began to manifest itself in Gavin Brice's
supposedly immune breast.  And this annoyed him more than
ever.  He told himself solemnly that this girl was none of the
wonderful things she seemed to be, and that he was an idiot
for feeling as he did.

To shake free from his unwonted reverie he asked abruptly, as
the meal ended:

"Would you mind telling me why you drew a revolver on me last
evening?  You don't seem the kind of girl to adopt Wild West
tactics and to carry a pistol around with you here in peaceful
Florida.  I don't want to seem inquisitive, of course, but?"

"And I don't want to seem secretive," she replied, nervously.
"All I can tell you is that my brother has--has enemies (as
you know from the attack on him) and that he doesn't think it
is safe for me to go around the grounds alone, late in the
day, unarmed.  So he gave me that old pistol of his, and asked
me to carry it.  That was why he sent North for Bobby Burns--as
a guard for me and for the place here.  When I saw you
appearing out of the swamp I--I took you for some one else.
I'm sorry."

"I'm not," he made answer.  "I--"

"You must have a charming idea of our hospitality," she went
on with a nervous little laugh.  "First I threaten to shoot
you.  Then my brother stuns you.  And both times when you are
doing us a service."

"Please!" he laughed.  "And if it comes to that, what must
you people think of a down-at-heel Yankee who descends on you
and cadges for a job after he's been told there's no work here
for him?"

"Oh, but there is!" she insisted.  "Milo told me so, this
morning.  And you're to stay here till he comes back and can
talk things over with you.  Would you care to walk around the
farm and the groves with me?  Or would the sun be bad for your
head?"

"It would be just the thing my head needs most," he declared.
"Besides, I've heard so much of these wonderful Florida farms.
I'm mighty anxious to inspect one of them.  We can start
whenever you're ready."

Ten minutes later they had left the lawn behind them, and had
passed through the hedge into the first of the chain of citrus
groves.  In front of them stretched some fifteen acres of
grapefruit trees.

"This is the worst soil we have," lectured Claire, evidently
keenly interested in the theme of agriculture and glad of an
attentive listener.  "It is more coral rock than anything
else.  That is why Milo planted it in grapefruit.  Grapefruit
will grow where almost nothing else will, you know.  Why, last
year wasn't by any means a banner season.  But he made $16,000
in gross profits off this one grapefruit orchard alone.  Of
course that was gross and not net.  But it--"

"Is there so much difference between the two?" he asked
innocently.  "Down here, I mean.  Up North, we have an idea
that all you Floridians need do is to stick a switch into the
rich soil, and let it grow.  We picture you as loafing around
in dreamy idleness till it's time to gather your fruit and to
sell it at egregious prices to us poor Northerners."

"It's a lovely picture," she retorted.  "And it's exactly
upside down, like most Northern ideas of Florida.  When it
comes to picking the fruit and shipping it North--that's the
one time we can loaf.  For we don't pick it or ship it.
That's done for us on contract.  It's our lazy time.  But
every other step is a fight.  For instance, there's the woolly
white fly and there's the rust mite and there's the purple
scale, and there are a million other pests just as bad.  And
we have to battle with them, all the time.  And when we spray
with the pumping engine, the sand is certain to get into the
engine and ruin it.  And when we--"

"I had no notion that--"

"No Northerners have," she said, warming to her theme.  "I
wish I could set some of them to scrubbing orange-trunks with
soap-and-water and spraying acre after acre, as we do, in a wild
race to keep up with the pests, knowing all the time that some
careless grove owner next door may let the rust mite or the
black fly get the better of his grove and let it drift over
into ours.  Then there's always the chance that a grove may
get so infected that the government will order it destroyed,--wiped
out .... I've been talking just about the citrus fruits,
the grapefruit and the tangeloes and oranges and all that.
Pretty much the same thing applies to all our crops down here.
We've as many  blights and pests and weather-troubles as you have
in the North.  And now and then, even in Dade County, we get a
frost that does more damage than a forest fire."

As she talked they passed out of the grapefruit grove, and
came to a plantation of orange trees.

"These are the joy of Milo's heart," she said with real pride,
waving her little hand toward the well-ranked lines of
blossoming and bearing young trees.  "Last year he cleared up
from this five-acre plot alone more than--"

"Excuse me," put in Gavin.  "I don't mean to be rude.  But
since he's made such a fine grove of it and takes such pride
in its looks, why doesn't he send a man or two out here with
a hoe, and get rid of that tangle of weeds?  It covers the
ground of the whole grove, and it grows rankly under every
tree.  If you'll pardon me for saying so, it gives the place
an awfully unkempt look.  If--"

Her gay laugh broke in on his somewhat hesitant criticism.

"Say that to any Floridian," she mocked, "and he'll save you
the trouble of looking for work by getting you admitted to the
nearest asylum.  Why Milo fosters those weeds and fertilizes
them and even warns the men not to trample them in walking
here.  If you should begin your work for Milo by hoeing out
any of these weeds he'd have to buy weed-seeds and sow them
all over again.  He--"

"Then there's a market for this sort of stuff?" he asked,
stooping to inspect with interest a spray of smelly ragweed.
"I didn't know--"

"No," she corrected.  "But the market for our oranges would
slump without them.  Here in the subtropics the big problem is
water for moistening the soil.  Very few of us irrigate.  We
have plenty of water as a rule.  But we also have more than a
plenty of sun.  The sun sucks up the water and leaves the soil
parched.  In a grove like this the roots of the orange trees
would suffer from it.  These weeds shelter the roots from the
sun, and they help keep the moisture in the ground.  They are
worth everything to us.  Of course, in some of the fields we
mulch to keep the ground damp.  Milo bought a whole carload of
Australian pine needles, last month at Miami.  They make a
splendid mulch.  Wild hay is good, too.  So is straw.  But
the pine needles are cheapest and easiest to get.  The rain
soaks down through them into the ground.  And they keep the
sun from drawing it back again.  Besides, they keep down weeds
in fields where we don't want weeds.  See!" she ended,
pointing to a new grove they were approaching.

Gavin noted that here the orange tree rows were alternated
with rows of strawberry plants.

"That was an idea of Milo's, too," she explained.  "It's
'intercrop' farming.  And he's done splendidly with it so far.
He thinks the eel-worm doesn't get at the berry plants as
readily here as in the open, but he's not sure of that yet.
He's had to plant cowpeas on one plot to get rid of it."

"The experiment of intercropping orange trees with
strawberries isn't new," said Brice thoughtlessly.  "When the
plants are as thick as he's got them here, it's liable to
harm the trees in the course of time.  Two rows, at most, are
all you ought to plant between the tree-ranks.  And that mulch
over there is a regular Happy Home for crickets.  If Standish
isn't careful--"

The girl was staring up at him in astonishment.  And Gavin was
aware for the first time that he had been thinking aloud.

"You see," he expounded, smiling vaingloriously down at her.
"I amused myself at the Miami library Saturday by browsing
over a sheaf of Government plant reports.  And those two solid
facts stuck in my memory.  Now, won't I be an invaluable aide
to your brother if I can remember everything else as easily?"

Still puzzled she continued to look up at him.

"It's queer that a man who has just come down here should
remember such a technical thing," said she.  "And yesterday
you warned me against letting Bobby Burns wander in the
palmetto scrub, for fear of rattlesnakes.  I--"

"That deep mystery is also easy to solve," he said.  "In the
smoker on the way South several men were telling how they had
lost valuable hunting dogs, hereabouts from rattlesnakes.  I
like Bobby Burns.  So I passed along the warning.  What are
those queer trees?" he asked shifting the dangerous subject.
"I mean the ones that look like a mixture of horse-chestnut
and--"

"Avocadoes," she answered, interest in the task of farm guide
making her forget her momentary bewilderment at his scraps of
local knowledge.  "They're one of our best crops.  Sometimes a
single avocado will sell in open market here for as much as
forty cents.  There's money in them, nearly always.  Good
money.  And the spoiled ones are great for the pigs.  Then the
Northern market for them--"

"Avocadoes?" he repeated curiously.  "There!  Now you see how
much I know about Florida.  From this distance, their fruits
look to me exactly like alligator pears or--"

Again, her laugh interrupted him.

"If only you'd happened to look in one or two more government
reports at the library," she teased, "you'd
know that an avocado and an alligator pear are the same
thing."

"Anyhow," he boasted, picking up a gold-red fruit at the edge
of a smaller grove they were passing, "anyhow, I know what
this is, without being told.  I've seen them a hundred times
in the New York markets.  This is a tangerine."

"In that statement," she made judicial reply, "you've made
only two mistakes.  You're improving.  In the first place,
that isn't a tangerine, though it looks like one--or would if
it were half as large.  That's a king orange.  In the second
place, you've hardly ever seen them in any New York market.
They don't transport as well as some other varieties.  And
very few of them go North.  Northerners don't know them.  And
they miss a lot.  For the king is the most delicious orange in
the world.  And it's the trickiest and hardest for us to
raise.  See, the skin comes off it as easily as off of a
tangerine, and it breaks apart in the same way.  The rust mite
has gotten at this one.  See that russet patch on one side of
it?  You'll often see it on oranges that go North.  Sometimes
they're russet all over.  That means the rust mite has dried
the oil in the skin and made the skin thinner and more
brittle.  It doesn't seem to injure the taste.  But it--"

"There's a grand tree over toward the road," he said, his
attention wandering.  "It must be nearly a century old.  It
has the most magnificent sweep of foliage I've seen since I
left the North.  What is it?"

"That?" she queried.  "Oh, that's another of Milo's prides.
It's an Egyptian fig.  'Ficus Something or
other.'  Isn't it beautiful?  But it isn't a century old.  It
isn't more than fifteen years old.  It grows tremendously
fast.  Milo has been trying to interest the authorities in
Miami in planting lines of them for shade trees and having
them in the city parks.  There's nothing more beautiful.  And
nothing, except the Australian pine, grows faster....  There's
another of Milo's delights," she continued, pointing to the
left.  "It's ever so old.  The natives around here call it 'The
Ghost Tree.'"

They had been moving in a wide circle through the groves.
Now, approaching the house from the other side, they came out
on a grassy little space on the far edge of the lawn.  In the
center of the space stood a giant live-oak towering as high as
a royal palm, and with mighty boughs stretching out in vast
symmetry on every side.  It was a true forest monarch.  And
like many another monarch, it was only a ghost of its earlier
grandeur.

For from every outflung limb and from every tiniest twig hung
plumes and festoons and stalactites of gray moss.  For perhaps
a hundred years the moss had been growing thus on the giant
oak, first in little bunches and trailers that were scarce
noticeable and which affected the forest monarch's appearance
and health not at all.

Then year by year the moss had grown and had taken toll of the
bark and sap.  At last it had killed the tree on which it fed.
And its own source of life being withdrawn itself had died.

So, now the gaunt tree with its symmetrical spread of branches
stood lifeless.  And its tons of low-hanging festooned moss
was as void of life as was the tree they had killed.
Tinder-dry it hung there, a beauteous, tragic, spectacle,
towering high above the surrounding flatness of landscape,
visible for miles by land and by sea.

Fifty yards beyond a high interlaced hedge of vines bordered
the clearing.  Toward this Gavin bent his idle steps,
wondering vaguely how such a lofty and impenetrable wall of
vine was supported from the far side.

Claire had stopped to call off Bobby Burns who had discovered
a highly dramatic toad-hole on the edge of the lawn and who
was digging enthusiastically at it with both flying fore-feet,
casting up a cloud of dirt and cutting into the sward's neat
border.  Thus she was not aware of Brice's diversion.

Gavin approached the twenty-foot high vine-wall, and thrust
his hand in through the thick tangle of leaves.  His sensitive
fingers touched the surface of a paling.  Running his hand
along, he found that the entire vine palisade was,
apparently, backed by a twenty-foot stockade of solid boards.
If there were a gate, it was hidden from view.  It was then
that Claire, looking up from luring Bobby Burns away from the
toad-hole, saw whither Gavin had strayed.

"Oh," she called, hurrying toward him.  "That's the enclosure
Milo made years ago for his experiments in evolving the
'perfect orange' he is so daft about.  He's always afraid some
other grower may take advantage of his experiments.  So he
keeps that little grove walled in.  He's never even let me go
in there.  So--"

A deafening salvo of barks from Bobby Burns broke in on her
recital.  The collie had caught sight of Simon Cameron mincing
along the lawn, and he gave rapturous and rackety chase.
Claire ran after them crying out to the dog to desist.  And
Gavin took advantage of the brief instant when her back was
turned to him.

His fingers in slipping along the wall had encountered a
rotting spot at the juncture of two palings.  Pushing sharply
against this he forced a fragment of the decayed wood inward.
Then, quickly, he shoved aside the tangle of vines and applied
one eye to the tiny aperture.

"A secret orange-grove, eh?" he gasped, under his breath.
"Good Lord!  Was she lying to me or did she actually believe
him when he lied to her?"




CHAPTER V

TRAPS AND TRAPPER


To south and to southeast, the green-blue transparent sea.
Within sight of the land, the purple-blue Gulf Stream,--a
mystic warm river a half mile deep, thousands of miles long,
traveling ever at a speed of eighty miles a day through the
depth of the ocean, as distinct and as unswerving from its
chosen course as though it flowed through land instead of
through shifting water.

Studded in the milk-tepid nearer waters, innumerable coral
islets and keys and ridges.  Then the coral-built tongue of
land running north without so much as a respectably large
hillock to break its flatness.  Along the coast the tawny
beaches, the mangrove-swamps, the rich farms, the groves, the
towns, the villages, the estates, snow-white Miami, the
nation's southernmost big city.

Back of this foreshore, countless miles of waving grass,
rooted in water, and with a stray clump of low trees, dotted
here and there, the Everglades, a vast marsh that runs north
to the inland sea known as Lake Okeechobee.  Then the solid
sandy ground of the main State.

Along the foreshore, and running inland, miles of sand-barren
scattered with gaunt pines and floored with harsh
palmetto-scrub.  Strewn here and there through this sandy
expanse lovely oases, locally known as "hammocks", usually in
hollows, and consisting of several acres of rich soil where
tropic and sub-tropic trees grow as luxuriantly as in a
jungle, where undergrowth and vine run riot, where orchid and
airplant and wondrous-hued flowers blaze through the green
gloom of interlaced foliage.

This, roughly, is a bird's-eye glimpse of the southeastern
stretch of Florida, a region of glory and glow and fortunes
and mystery.  (Which is perhaps a momentary digression from
our story, but will serve, for all that to fix its setting
more vividly in the eyes of the mind.)


When Milo Standish came back from Miami that noon he professed
much loud-voiced joy at seeing his guest so well recovered
from the night's mishaps.  At lunch, he suggested:

"I am running across to Roustabout Key this afternoon, in the
launch.  It's an island I bought a few years ago.  I keep a
handful of men there to work a grapefruit grove and a mango
orchard and some other stuff I've planted.  I go over to it
every week or so.  Would you care to come along?"

He spoke with elaborate carelessness, and looked anywhere
except at his guest.  Gavin, not appearing to note the
concealed nervousness of his host's voice and manner, gave
eager consent.  And at two o'clock they set forth.

They drove in Milo's car a half-mile or more to southwestward
along the road which fronted the house.  Then turning into a
sand byway which ran crookedly at right angles to it and which
skirted the southern end of the mangrove-swamp, they headed
for the sea.  Another half-mile brought them to a
handkerchief-sized beach, much like that on the other side of
the swamp, where Gavin had found the hidden path.  Here, on
mangrove-wood piles, was a short pier with a boathouse at its
far end.

"I keep my launch and my fishing-boats in there," explained
Milo, as he climbed out of the car.  "If it wasn't for that
pesky swamp.  I could have had this pier directly back of my
house, and saved a lot of distance."

"Why not cut a road through the swamp?" suggested Brice,
following him along the pier.

Again Standish gave vent to that great laugh of his--a laugh
outwardly jovial, but as hollow as a shell.

"Young man," said he, "if ever you try to cut your way
through an East Coast mangrove-swamp you'll find out just how
silly that question is.  A swamp like that  might as well be a
quick-sand, for all the chance a mortal has of traveling
through it."

Gavin made no reply.  Again, he was visualizing the cleverly
engineered path from the beach-edge to Milo's lawn.  And he
recalled Claire's unspoken plea that he say nothing to
Standish about his chance discovery of it.  He remembered,
too, the night-song of the mocking bird from the direction of
that path, and the advent of Rodney Hade from it.

Milo had unlocked the boat-house, and was at work over a
fifteen-foot steel motorboat which was slung on chains above
the water.  A winch and well-constructed pulleys-and-chains
made simple the labor of launching it in so quiet a sea.

Out they fared into the gleaming sunlit waters of the bay.
Far to eastward gleamed the white city of Miami, and nearer,
across the bay from it the emerald stretch of key with Cape
Florida and the old Spanish Light on its southern point and
the exquisite "golden house" of Mashta shining midway down its
shoreline.  Miles to eastward gleamed the gray viaduct, the
grain elevator outlines of the Flamingo rising yellow above a
fire-blue sea.

"I used to hear great stories about this region years ago,"
volunteered Brice as the launch danced over the transparent
water past Ragged Keys and bore southward.  "I heard them from
a chap who used to winter hereabouts.  It was he who first
interested me in Florida.  He says these keys and inlets and
changing channels used to be the haunts of Spanish Main
pirates."

"They were," said Milo.  "The pirates knew these waters.  The
average merchant skipper didn't.  They'd build signal flares
on the keys to lure ships onto the rocks, and then loot them.
At least that was the everyday (or everynight) amusement of
their less venturesome members and their women and children.
The more adventurous used to overhaul vessels skirting the
coast to and from Cuba and Central America.  They'd sally out
from their hiding-places among the keys and lie in wait for
the merchant-ships.  If the prey was weak enough they'd board
and ransack her and make her crew walk the plank,--(that's how
Aaron Burr's beautiful daughter is supposed to have died on
her way North, you know,)--and if the ship showed fight or
seemed too tough a handful the pirates hit on a surer way of
capture.  They'd turn tail and run.  The merchant ship would
give chase, for there were fat rewards out for the capture of
the sea rovers, you know.  The pirates would head for some
strip of water that seemed perfectly navigable.  The ship
would follow, and would pile up on a sunken reef that the
pirates had just steered around."

"Clever work!"

"They were a thrifty and shrewd crowd those old-time
black-flaggers.  After they were wiped out the wreckers still
reaped their fine harvest by signaling ships onto reefs at
night.  Their descendants live down among some of the keys
still.  We call them 'conchs,' around here.  They're an
illiterate, uncivilized, furtive, eccentric lot.  And they
pick up some sort of living off wrecked ships and off what
cargo washes ashore from the wrecks.  A missionary went down
there and tried to convert them.  He found the 'conch'
children already had religion enough to pray every night.
'Lord, send a wreck!'  The conchs gather a lot of plunder
every year.  They--"

"Do they sell it or claim salvage on it, or--?"

"Not they.  That would call for too much brain and education
and for mixing with civilization.  They wear it, or put it to
any crazy use they can think of.  For instance fifty
sewing-machines were in the cargo of a tramp steamer bound
from Charleston to Brazil one winter.  She ran ashore a few
miles south of here.  The conchs got busy with the plunder.
The cargo was a veritable godsend to them.  They used the
sewing machines as anchors for their boats.  Another time a
box of shoes washed ashore.  They were left-hand shoes, all
of them.  The right-hand box must have landed somewhere else.
And a hundred conchs blossomed forth with brand new shoes.
They could wear the left shoe, of course, with no special
bother.  And they slit down the vamp of the shoe they put on
the right foot, so their toes could stick out and not be
cramped.  A good many people think they still lure ships
ashore by flares.  But the lighthouse service has pretty well
put a stop to that."

"This chap I was speaking about,--the fellow who told me so
much about this region," said Gavin, "told me there is
supposed to be pirate gold buried in more than one of these
keys."

"Rot!" snorted Milo with needless vehemence.  "All poppycock!
Look at it sanely for a minute, and you'll see that all the
yarns of pirate gold-including Captain Kidd's--are rank
idiocy.  In the first place, the pirates never seized any
such fabulous sums of money as they were credited with.  The
bullion ships always went under heavy man-o'-war escort.  When
pirates looted some fairly rich merchant ship there were
dozens of men to divide the plunder among.  And they sailed to
the nearest safe port to blow it all on an orgy.  Of course,
once in a blue moon they buried or hid the valuables they got
from one ship while they went after another.  And if they
chanced to sink or be captured and hanged during such a raid
the treasure remained hidden.  If they survived, they blew it.
That's the one off-chance of there ever being any buried
pirate treasure.  And there would be precious little of it.
at that.  A few hundred dollars worth at most.  No, Brice.
this everlasting legend of buried treasure is fine in a
sea-yarn.  But in real life it's buncombe."

"But this same man told me there were stories of bullion ships
and even more modern vessels carrying a money cargo that sank
in these waters, during storms or from running into reefs,"
pursued Brice, with no great show of interest, as he leaned
far overside for a second glimpse at a school of five-foot
baracuda which lay basking on the snowy surface of the sand.
two fathoms below the boat.  "That, at least, sounds probable.
doesn't it?"

"No," snapped Milo flushing angrily and his brow creasing, "it
doesn't.  These water are traversed  every year by thousands
of craft of all sizes.  The water is crystal clear.  Any
wrecked ship could be seen at the bottom.  Why, everybody has
seen the hull of that old tramp steamer a few miles above
here.  It's in deep water, at that.  What chance--?"

"Yet there are hundreds of such stories afloat," persisted
Brice.  "And there are more yarns of buried treasure among the
keys than there are keys.  For instance didn't old Caesar, the
negro pirate, hang out here, somewhere?"

Milo laughed again, this time with a maddening tolerance.

"Oh, Caesar?" said he.  "To be sure.  He's as much a legend of
these keys as Lafitte is of New Orleans.  He was an escaped
slave, who scraped together a dozen fellow-ruffians, black and
white and yellow--mostly yellow--about a century ago, and
stole a long boat or a broken-down sloop, and started in at
the trade of pirate.  He didn't last long.  And there's no
proof he ever had any special success.  But he's the sea-hero
of the conchs.  They've named a key and a so-called creek
after him, and in my father's time there used to be an old
iron ring in a bowlder known as 'Caesar's Rock.'  The ring was
probably put there by oystermen.  But the conchs insisted
Caesar used to tie up there.  Then there's the 'Pirates'
Punchbowl,' off Coconut Grove.  Caesar is supposed to have dug
that.  He--"

An enormous sailfish--dazzlingly metallic blue and silver--broke
from the calm water just ahead, and whirled high in air,
smiting the bay again with a splash that sounded like a
gunshot.

"That fellow must have been close to seven feet long,"
commented Milo as the two men watched the churned water where
the fish had struck.  "He's the kind you see  when you aren't
trolling.  He's after a school of ballyhoos or mossbunkers
....  There's Roustabout Key  just ahead," he finished as
their launch rounded an outcrop of rock and came in view of a
mile-long wooded island a bare thousand yards off the weather
bow.

A mangrove fringe covered the shoreline, two thirds of the way
around the key.  At the eastern end was a strip of snowy beach
backed by an irregular line of coconut palms, and with a very
respectable dock in the foreground.  From the pier a wooden
path led upward  through the scattering double row of palms to
a corrugated iron hut, with smaller huts and outbuildings half
seen through the foliage-vistas beyond.

"I've some fairly good mango trees back yonder," said Standish
as he brought the launch alongside the dock's wabbly float,
"and grapefruit that is paying big dividends at last.  The
mangoes won't be ripe till June, of course.  But they're sold
already, to the last half-bushel of them."

"'Futures,' eh?" suggested Gavin.

"'Futures,'" assented Milo.  "And 'futures' in farming are
just about as certain as in Wall Street.  There's a mighty
gamble to this farm-game."

"How long have--?" began Gavin, then stopped short  and
stared.

One or two negro laborers had drifted down toward the dock, as
the boat warped in at the float.  Now, from the corrugated
iron hut appeared a white man, who, at sight of the boat,
broke into a limping run and was in time to catch the line
which Milo flung at him.

The man was sparsely and sketchily clad.  At first, his
tanned face seemed to be of several different colors and to
have been modeled by some bungling caricaturist.  Yet, despite
this eccentricity of aspect, something about the obsequiously
hurrying man struck Brice as familiar.  And, all at once, he
recognized him.

This was the big beach comber with whom Gavin had fought
barely twenty-four hours earlier.  The man bore bruises and
swellings a-plenty on his rugged features, where Brice's
whalebone blows had crashed.  And they had distorted his face
almost past recognition.  He moved, too, with manifest
discomfort, as if all his huge body were as sore as his
visage.

"Hello, Roke!!" hailed Milo genially, then in amaze, "what in
thunder have you been doing to yourself?  Been trying to stop
the East Coast Flyer?  Or did you just get into an argument
with one of the channel dredges?"

"Fell," said Roke, succinctly, jerking his thumb back toward
the corrugated iron hut.  "Climbed my roof to mend a leak.
Fell.  My face hit every bump.  Then I landed on a pile of
coconuts.  I'm sore all over.  I--"

He gurgled, mouthingly, as his swollen eyes chanced to light
on Gavin Brice, who was just following Milo from the launch
to the float.  And his discolored and unshaven jaw went slack.

"Oh, Brice," said Standish carelessly.  "This is my foreman
here, Perry Roke.  As a rule he looks like other people,
except that he's bigger, just now his cravings for falling off
corrugated roofs have done things to his face.  Shake hands
with him.  If you like the job I'm going to offer you he and
you will be side-partners over here."

Gavin faced his recent adversary, grinning pleasantly up at
the battered and scowling face, and noting that the knife
sheath at Roke's hip was still empty.

"Hello!" he said civilly, offering his hand.

Roke gulped again, went purple, and, with sudden furious
vehemence, grabbed at the proffered hand, enfolding it in his
own monstrous grip in an industrious attempt to smash its
every bone.

But reading the intent with perfect ease.  Brice shifted his
own hand ever so little and with nimbly practised fingers
eluded the crushing clasp, at the same time slipping his thumb
over the heel of Roke's clutching right hand and letting his
three middle fingers meet at the exact center of that hand's
back.  Then, tightening his hold, he gave an almost
imperceptible twist.  It was one of the first and the simplest
of the tricks his jiu-jutsu instructor had taught him.  And,
as ever with an opponent not prepared for it, the grip served.

To the heedlessly watching Standish he seemed merely to be
accepting the invitation to shake hands with Roke.  But the
next instant, under the apparently harmless contact, Roke's
big body veered sharply to one side, from the hips upward,
and a bellow of raging pain broke from his puffed lips.

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" cried Brice in quick contrition: "You
must have hurt your hand when you fell off that roof.  I'm
sorry if I made it worse."

Nursing his wrenched wrist.  Roke glowered hideously at the
smiling Gavin.  Brice could feel no compunction for his own
behavior.  For he remembered the hurled knife and the brutal
kicking of the dog.  Yet he repented him of the hand-twisting
trick.  For if he and Roke were expected to work together as
Milo had said, he had certainly made a most unfortunate
beginning to their acquaintanceship, and just now he had added
new and painful aggravation to his earlier offense.

Milo was surveying the sufferer with no great pity, as Roke
bent over his hurt wrist.

"Too bad!" commented Standish.  "I suppose that will put a
crimp in your violin-playing for a while."

Turning to Gavin who looked in new surprise at the giant on
hearing of this unexpected accomplishment.  Milo explained:

"I hired Roke to run this key for me and keep the conchs and the
coons at work.  But I've got a pretty straight tip that, as soon
as my back is turned, he cuts indoors and spends most of his day
whanging at that disreputable old violin of his.  And when Rodney
Hade comes over here.  I can't get a lick of work out of Roke,
for love or money.  Hade is one of the best amateur violinists
in America, and he's daft on playing.  He drops in here, every
now and then--he has an interest with me in the groves--and as
soon as he catches sight of Roke's violin, he starts playing it.
That means no more work out of Roke till Hade chooses to stop.
He just stands, with his mouth wide open, hypnotized.  Can't
drag him away for a second.  Hey, Roke?"

Roke had ceased nursing his wrist and had listened
with sheepish amusement to his employer's guying.  But at this
question, he made answer:

"I'm here now."

He jerked the thumb of his uninjured hand toward a spic-and-span
launch which lay moored between two sodden scows, and
then nodded in the direction of the corrugated iron hut among
the trees.

Listening--though the wind set the wrong way for it--Brice
could hear faintly the strains of a violin, played ever so
softly and with a golden wealth of sweetness.  Even at that
distance, by listening closely, he could make out a phrase or
so of Dvorak's "Hiawatha" music from the "New World Symphony."
Milo's loud laugh broke in on his audition and on the suddenly
rapt look upon Roke's bruised face.

"Come along!" said Standish, leading the way toward the house.
"Music's a fine thing, I'm told.  But it doesn't spray a
grapefruit orchard or keep the scale off of mango trees.  Come
up to the house.  I want to show you over the island and have
a chat with you about the job I have in mind."

As Milo strode on the two others fell in step behind him.
Brice lowered his voice and said to the sulking Roke:

"That collie belongs to Mr. Standish.  I did you a good turn
it seems by keeping you from stealing him.  You'd have been in
a worse fix than you are now, if Mr. Standish had come over
here to-day and found him on the island."

Roke did not deign to reply, but moved a little farther from
the speaker.

"At this rate," said Brice pleasantly, "you and I are likely
to have a jolly time together, out here.  I can't imagine a
merrier chum for a desert island visit.  I only hope I won't
neglect my work chatting with you all day."

Roke eyed him obliquely as he plodded on, and his battered
lip-corner lifted a little in what looked like a beast snarl.
But he said nothing.

Then they were at the shallow porch of the hut and Milo
Standish had thrown open its iron door letting out a gush of
golden melody from the violin.  At his hail, the music
ceased.  And Rodney Hade, fiddle in hand, appeared in the
doorway.

"You're late," said the violinist, speaking to Milo with that
ever-smiling suavity which Gavin recalled from the night
before, and ignoring Gavin entirely "You've kept me waiting."

Despite the smooth voice and the eternal smile there was an
undernote of rebuke in the words, as of a teacher who reproves
a child for tardiness.  And,  meekly, Standish replied:

"I'm sorry.  I was detained at Miami.  And lunch was late.  I
got here as soon as I could.  I--"

With an impatient little wave of one white hand.  Hade checked
his excuses and dismissed the subject.  In the same moment his
snakelike black eyes fixed themselves on Brice whom he seemed
to notice for the first time.  The eyes were smiling.  But he
granted the guest no further form of salutation, as he asked
abruptly:

"Where have I seen you before?"

"You saw me last night," returned Gavin, still wondering at
this man's dictatorial attitude toward the aggressive Milo
Standish and at Milo's almost cringing acceptance of it.  "I
was at the Standishes.  I was just starting for bed when you
dropped in.  Miss Standish introduced--"

"I'm not speaking about last night," curtly interrupted Hade,
though his voice was as soft as ever and his masklike face was
set in its everlasting smile.  "I mean, where did I run across
you before last night?"

"Well.  Mr. Bones," answered Gavin with flippant insolence,
"Dat am de question propounded.  Where did you-all run acrost
me befo' las' night?"

Milo and Roke stirred convulsively, as if scandalized that any
one should dare speak with such impudence to Hade.  Rodney
himself all but lost the eternal smile from his thin lips: and
his voice was less suave than usual as he said:

"I don't care for impertinence, especially from employees.
You will bear that in mind.  Now you will answer my question.
Where did I see you?"

"If you can't remember," countered Gavin, "you can hardly
expect me to.  I live in New York.  I have lived there or
thereabouts for a number of years.  I was overseas--stationed
at Bordeaux and then at Brest--for a few months in 1918.  As a
boy I lived on my father's farm in northern New York State,
near Manlius.  That's the best answer I can give you.  If it
will make you recall where you've seen me--all right.  If not
I'm afraid I can't help you out.  In any case what does it
matter?  I don't claim to be anybody especial.  I have no
references.  Mr. Standish knows that.  If he's willing to give
me some sort of job in spite of such drawbacks, it seems to
be entirely his affair."

"The job I had--have--in mind for you," spoke up Milo, at a
glance from Hade, "is on this key, here.  I need an extra man
in the main storehouse to oversee the roustabouts there.  At
this season Roke is too busy outdoors to keep the right kind
of eye on them.  The pay won't be large to start with.  But if
you make good at it.  I may have something better to offer you
on the mainland.  Or I may not.  In any case.  I understand
this is only a stopgap for you, and that you are down here for
your health.  If you are interested in the idea, well and
good.  If not--"

He paused and glanced at Hade as if for prompting.  Throughout
his harangue Standish had given Brice the impression of a man
who recites a lesson taught him by another.  Now Hade took up
the tale.

"I think," said he smilingly--his momentary impatience gone--"I
think, before answering--in fact before coming down to
terms and other details--you might perhaps care to stroll
around the island a little, and get an idea of it for
yourself.  It may be you won't care to stay here.  It may be
you will like it very much.  Mr. Standish and I have some
routine business to talk over with Roke.  Suppose you take a
walk over the place?  Roke, assign one of the men to go with
him and show him around."

With instant obedience.  Roke started for the door.  Indeed, he
had almost reached it before Hade ceased speaking.  Gavin raised
his brows at this swift anticipation of orders.  And into his
mind came an odd thought.

"You seemed surprised to see me this afternoon," said he as he
followed Roke to the porch and closed the door behind them.
"Yet Mr. Hade had told you I was coming here.  He had told
you, and he had told you to have some one ready to show me
over the island."

As he spoke Gavin indicated with a nod a man who was trotting
across the sandy clearing toward them.

"Didn't know it was you!" grunted Roke, too surprised by the
direct assertion to fence.  "Said some feller would come with
Mr. Standish.  He--.  How'd you know he told me?" he demanded
in sudden angry bewilderment.

"There!" exclaimed Gavin admiringly.  "I knew we'd chat along
as lovingly as two turtle-doves when once we'd get really
started.  You're quite a talker when you want to be, Rokie my
lad!  If only you didn't speak as if you were trying to save
words on a telegram.  Here's the chap you'd ordered to be
cruising in the offing as my escort, eh?" as the barefoot
roustabout reached the porch.  "All right.  Good-by."

Leaving the grumbling and muttering Roke scowling after him.
Brice stepped out onto the sand to meet the newcomer.  The
roustabout apparently belonged to the conch tribe of which
Milo had spoken.  Thin, undersized, swarthy, with features
that showed a trace of negro and perhaps of Indian blood as
well, he had a furtive manner and seemed to cringe away from
the Northerner as they set off across the clearing, toward the
distant huts and still more distant orchards.

He was bareheaded and stoop-shouldered.  Beyond a ragged pair
of drill trousers--indescribably dirty--his only garment was a
still dirtier and raggeder undershirt.  His naked feet flapped
awkwardly, like a turtle's.  He was not a pretty or
prepossessing sight.

Across the clearing he pattered, head down, still cringing
away from the visitor.  As the two entered the shadows of the
nearest grove Gavin Brice glanced quickly around him on all
sides.  The conch did the same.  Then the two moved on with
the same distance between them as before.

And as they went Gavin spoke.  He spoke in a low tone, not
moving his lips or looking directly toward the other man.

"Good boy, Davy!" he said, approvingly.  "How did you get the
job of taking me around?  I was afraid I'd have to look for
you."

"Two other men were picked out to do it sir," said the conch
without slackening his pace or turning his head.  "One after
the other.  One was a nigger.  One was a conch.  Both of 'em
got sick.  I paid 'em to.  And I paid the nigger an extra five
to tell Roke I'd be the best man to steer you.  He said he'd
been on jobs with me before.  He and the conch are malingering
in the sick shed.  Ipecac.  I gave it to 'em."

"Good!" repeated Gavin.  "Mighty good.  Now what's the idea?"

"You're to be kept over here, sir," said the conch.  "I don't
know why.  Roke told me you're a chum of Hade's, and that
Hade's doing it to have a bit of fun with you.  So I'm to lead
you around awhile, showing you the plant and such.  Then I'm
to take you to the second storage hut and tell you we've got a
new kind of avocado stored in there, and let you go in ahead
of me, and I'm to slam the spring-lock door on you."

"Hm!  That all, Davy?"

"Yes, sir.  Except of course that it's a lie.  Hade don't play
jokes or have fun with any one.  If he's trying to keep you
locked up here a while it's most likely a sign he don't want
you on the mainland for some reason.  Maybe that sounds
foolish.  But it's all the head or tail I can make out of it,
sir."

"It doesn't 'sound foolish,'" contradicted Brice.  "As it
happens it's just what he wants to do.  I don't know just why.
But I mean to find out.  He wants me away from a house over
there.  A house I had a lot of trouble in getting a foothold
in.  It's taken me the best part of a month.  And now I don't
mean to spend another month in getting back there."

"No, sir," said Davy, respectfully, still plodding on in
front with head and shoulders bent.  "No, sir.  Of course.
But--if you'll let me ask, sir--does Hade know?  Does he
suspicion you?  If that's why he's framed this then Roustabout
Key is no place for you.  No more is Dade County.  He--"

"No," returned Gavin, smiling at the real terror that had
crept into the other's tone.  "He doesn't know.  And I'm sure
he doesn't suspect.  But he has a notion he's seen me
somewhere.  And he's a man who doesn't take chances.  Besides
he wants me away from the Standish house.  He wants every
outsider away from it.  And I knew this would be the likeliest
place for him to maroon me.  That's why I sent you word ....
I'm a bit wobbly in my beliefs about the Standishes,--one of
them anyhow.  Now, where's this storehouse prison of mine?"

"Over there, sir, to the right.  But--"

"Take me over there.  And walk slowly.  I've some things to
say to you on the way, and I want you to get them straight in
your memory."

"Yes, sir," answered the conch, shifting his course, so as to
bring his steps in a roundabout way toward the squat
storeroom.  "And before you begin there's an extra key to the
room under the second packing box to the right.  I made it
from Roke's own key when I made duplicates of all the keys
here.  I put it there this morning.  In case you should want
to get out, you can say you found it lying on the floor there.
I rusted all the keys I made so they look old.  He'll likely
think it's an extra key that was lost somewhere in there."

"Thanks," said Gavin.  "You're a good boy.  And you've got
sense.  Now listen:--"

Talking swiftly and earnestly, he followed Davy toward the
square little iron building, the conch outwardly making no
sign that he heard.  For, not many yards away, a handful of
conchs and negroes were at work on a half-completed shed.

Davy came to the store-room door, and opened it.  Then,
turning to Brice he said aloud in the wretched dialect of his
class:

"Funny avocado fruits all pile up in yon.  Mighty funny.  Make
yo' laugh.  Want to go see?  Look!"

He swung wide the iron door and pointed to the almost totally
dark interior.

"Funny to see in yon," he said invitingly.  "Never see any
like 'em befo'.  I strike light for you.  Arter you, my boss."

One or two men working on the nearby shed had stopped their
labor and were glancing covertly toward them.

"Oh, all right!" agreed Brice, his uninterested voice
carrying well though it was not noticeably raised.  "It seems
a stuffy sort of hole.  But I'll take a look at it if you
like.  Where's that light you're going to strike?  It--"

As he spoke he sauntered into the storeroom.  His lazy speech
was cut short by the clangorous slamming of the iron door
behind him.  Conscientiously he pounded on the iron and yelled
wrathful commands to Davy to open.  Then when he thought he
had made noise enough to add verity to his role and to free
the conch from any onlooker's suspicion he desisted.

Groping his way through the dimness to the nearest box, he
sat down, philosophically, to wait.

"Well," he mused sniffing in no approval at all at the musty
air of the place and peering up at the single eight-inch
barred window that served more for ventilation than for light.
"Well, here we are.  And here, presumably, we stay till
Standish and Hade go back to the mainland.  Then I'm to be let
out by Roke, with many apologies for Davy's mistake.  There'll
be no way of getting back.  The boats will be hidden or
padlocked.  And here I'll stay, with Roke for a chum, till
whatever is going on at Standish's house is safely finished
with.  It's a pretty program.  If I can get away to-night
without Roke's finding it out till morning--"

His eyes were beginning to accustom themselves to the room.
Its corners and farther reaches and most of its floor were
still invisible.  But, by straining his gaze, he could just
make out the shapes of a crate or two and several packing
boxes close to the wall.  The central space was clear.  In
spite of the stuffiness, there was a damp chill to the gloomy
place, by contrast to the vivid sunlight and the sweep of the
trade-winds, outside.

Gavin stretched himself out at full length on the long box,
and prepared to take a nap.  First he reached toward the next
box--the one under which Davy had told him the key was hidden--and
moved it an inch or so to make certain it was not full
enough to cause him any especial effort in case he should not
be released until next day and should have need of the key.
Then he shut his eyes, and let himself drift toward slumber.

It was perhaps two hours later when he was roused from a light
doze by hearing something strike the concrete floor of his
prison, not six feet from his head.  The thing had fallen
with a slithering, uneven sound, such as might be made by the
dropping of a short length of rope.

Brice sat up.  He noted that the room was no longer light
enough to see across.  And he glanced in the direction of the
window.  Its narrow space was blocked by something.  And as he
looked he heard a second object slither to the floor.

"Some one's dropping things down here through that
ventilator," he conjectured.

And at the same moment a third fall sounded, followed almost
at once by a fourth.  Then, for a second, the window space was
clear, only to be blocked again as the person outside returned
to his post.  And in quick succession three more objects were
sent slithering down to the floor.  After which the window was
cleared once more, and Brice could hear receding steps.

But he gave no heed to the steps.  For as the last of the
unseen things had been slid through the aperture, another
sound had focused all his attention, and had sent queer little
quivers up his spine.

The sound had been a long-drawn hiss.

And Gavin Brice understood.  Now he knew why the softly
falling bodies had slithered so oddly down the short distance
between window and floor.  And he read aright the slippery
crawling little noises that had been assailing his ears.

The unseen man outside had thrust through the ventilator not
less than seven or eight snakes, carried thither, presumably,
in bags.

Crouching on his long box Gavin peered about him.  Faintly
against the dense gray of the shadowy floor, he could see
thick ropelike forms twisting sinuously to and fro, as if
exploring their new quarters or seeking exit.  More than once,
as these chanced to cross one another's path, that same
long-drawn hiss quavered out into the dark silences.

And now Brice's nostrils were assailed by a sickening smell as
of crushed cucumbers.  And at the odor his fists tightened in
new fear.  For no serpents give off that peculiar odor,
except members of the pit-viper family.

"They're not rattlesnakes," he told himself.  "For a scared or
angry rattler would have this room vibrating with his whirr.
We're too far south for copperheads.  The--the only other
pit-viper I ever heard of in Florida is the--cotton-mouth
moccasin!"

At the realization he was aware of a wave of physical terror
that swept him like a breath of ice.

Without restoratives at hand the moccasin's bite is certain
death.  The plan had been well thought out.  At the very first
step the frantic prisoner might reasonably be relied on to
encounter one or more of the crawling horrors.  The box on
which he crouched was barely eighteen inches high.  The next
box--under which rested the key--was several feet away.  The
door was still farther off.

Truly Standish and Hade appeared to have hit on an excellent
plan for getting rid of the man they wanted out of the way!
It would be so easy for Roke to explain to possible inquirers
that Brice had chanced to tread on a poisonous snake in his
wanderings about the key!

The slightest motion might well be enough to stir to active
hostility the swarm of serpents already angered by their
sudden dumping into this clammy den.

Weaponless, helpless, the trapped man crouched
there and waited.




CHAPTER VI

IN THE DAY OF BATTLE


As Gavin Brice sat with feet drawn up under him,  listening to
the gruesome slither of the moccasins along the concrete
floor just below he was gripped for a minute by irresistible
terror.  It was all so simple--so complete!  And he had been
calmly self-confident of his ability to command the situation,
to play these people's own game and to beat them at it.
Grinning and open-eyed he had marched into the trap.  He had
been glad to let Hade and Standish think him safely out of
their way, and had planned so confidently to return by stealth
to the mainland that night and to Milo's house!

And now they had had absolutely no difficulty in caging him,
and in arranging that he should be put forever out of their
way.  The most stringent inquiry--should any such be made--could
only show that he had been bitten once or more by a
deadly snake.  Any post-mortem would bear out the statement.

It was known to every one that many of the keys--even several
miles from the mainland--are infested by rattlesnakes and by
other serpents, though how such snakes ever got to the islands
is as much of a mystery to the naturalist world as is the
presence of raccoons and squirrels on the same keys.  It is
simply one of the hundred unsolvable mysteries and puzzles of
the subtropic region.

In his jiu-jutsu instructions Brice had learned a rule which
he had carried into good effect in other walks of life.
Namely to seem to play one's opponent's game and to be fooled
by it, and then, taking the conquering adversary by surprise,
to strike.  Thus he had fallen in with Standish's suggestion
that he come to the island, though he had thought himself
fairly sure as to the reason for the request.  Thus, too, he
had let himself be lured into this storeroom, still smugly
confident that he held the whip hand of the situation.

And as a result he was looking into the ghastly eyes of death.

Like an engine that "races," his fertile brain was unduly
active in this moment of stark horror, and it ran uselessly.
Into his over-excited mind flashed pictures of a thousand bits
of the past--one of them, by reason of recent association far
more vivid than the rest.

He saw himself with four other A.E.F. officers, standing in a
dim corner of a high-ceiled old room in  a ruined chateau in
Flanders.  In the room's center  was a table.  Around this
were grouped a double line  of uniformed Americans--a
court-martial.  In came two provosts' men leading between them
a prisoner, a man in uniform and wearing the insignia of a
United States army major--the cleverest spy it was said in
all the Wilhelmstrasse's pay, a genius who had grown rich at
his filthy trade of selling out his country's secrets, and
who had been caught at last by merest chance.

The prisoner had glanced smilingly about the half-lit room as
he came in.  For the barest fraction of a second his gaze had
flickered over Gavin Brice and the three other officers who
stood there in the shadow.  Then, with that same easy,
confident smile on his masklike, pallid face, the spy had
turned his glittering black eyes on the officers at the
courtmartial table.

"Gentlemen," he had said amusedly, "you need not go through
the farce of trying me.  I am guilty.  I say this with no
bravado and with no fear.  Because the bullet has never been
molded and the rope has never been plaited that can kill me.
And the cell is not yet made that can hold me."

He had said it smilingly, and in a velvet suave voice.  Yes,
and he had made good his boast.  For--condemned to die at
daylight--he had escaped from his ill-constructed prison room
in the chateau a little before dawn and had gotten clean away
after killing one of his guards.

"He never set eyes on me except for that instant, there in the
shadows," Brice found himself reflecting for the hundredth
time.  "And there were all the others with me.  Yet last night
he recalled my face.  It's lucky he didn't recall where he'd
seen it.  Or--perhaps he did."

With a start, he came out of his half-hypnotic daze--a daze
which had endured but a few seconds.  And once more his
rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the
hideous peril in which he crouched.

Then--in one of the odd revulsions which flash  across men at
unnaturally high tension--his daze and his terror merged all
at once into a blaze of wholesome rage.  Nor was his rage
directed against Rodney Hade, but against Milo Standish, the
man whose life he had saved not twenty hours earlier, and who
had repaid that mighty service now by helping to arrange his
murder.

At the thought Brice grew hot with fury.  He longed to stand
face to face with the blackguard who had rewarded a life-gift
in such vile fashion.  He yearned to tell Standish in fiery
words how unspeakable had been the action, and then foot to
foot, fist to fist, to take out of the giant's hide some tithe
of the revenge due for such black ingratitude.

The ferocious impulse set steady his quivering nerves.  No
longer did his brain race uselessly.  Again it was alert,
resourceful, keen.

Standish!  Yes, and no doubt Standish's sister too!  The girl
whose eyes had made him feel as if he were on holy ground--the
girl whom he had been so irritatingly unable to get out of his
mind!

With an angry shake of the head Gavin dismissed Claire from
his thoughts.  And his newborn hate concentrated on her
brother who had betrayed to death his rescuer.  Obsessed with
the fierce craving to stand face to face with the
blonde-bearded giant he banished his lethargy of hopelessness
and cast about for means of escape out of this seemingly
inescapable snare.

First, the key must be found.  Then the door must be reached
and opened.  In the way of both enterprises writhed a half
dozen or more deadly snakes.  And to the problem of winning
past them alive and getting to his enemy.  Gavin Brice bent
his trained faculties.

The box whereon he sat was covered with loose boards nailed
down only at one end, a long strip of thin iron or copper
binding the one unopened edge.  So much his groping fingers
told him.  Moving to one corner of the box top he pushed aside
a board and plunged his hand into the interior.  It was as he
had hoped.  According to custom when the box had been emptied
the jute and shredded paper stuffing of its contents had been
thrust back into it for future use.

Feverishly, Gavin began to pull forth great handfuls of paper
and of excelsior.  These he piled onto the box top.  Then,
exerting all his skilled strength, he tugged at the narrow
iron strip which bound, lengthwise, one side of the box.

This task was by no means easy, for the nails were long.  And
the iron's sharp edges cut cruelly into the tugging fingers.
But, inch by inch, he tore it free.  And at the end of three
minutes he was strengthening and testing a willowy five-foot
strip of metal.  Laying this across his knees and fishing up
another double handful of the packing paper and jute he groped
in his pockets with bleeding fingertips for a match.

He found but one.  Holding it tenderly he scraped its surface
against his nail--a trick he had picked up in the army.  The
sulphur snapped and ignited, the wooden sliver burning freely
in that windless air.

Giving it a good start, he touched the point of flame to the
piled jute and paper in front of him.  It caught in an
instant.  Still holding the lighted match, he repeated this
ticklish process time after time, tossing handfuls of the
blazing stuff down onto the floor at his side.

In two minutes more he had a gayly-flaming pile of inflammable
material burning high there.  Its gleam lightened every inch
of the gloomy room.  It brought out into hideous clearness the
writhing dark bodies of the crawling moccasins, even to the
patches of white at their lips which gave them their sinister
name of "cottonmouths."  Fat and short and horrible to look
upon, they were, as they slithered and twisted here and there
along the bright-lit floor or coiled and hissed at sight of
the flame and of the fast plying hand and arm of the captive
just above them.

But Brice had scant eyes or heed for them.  Now that his blaze
was started past danger of easy extinction, he plunged both
hands again into the box.  And now, two handfuls at a time.
he began to cast forth more and more of the stuffing.

With careful aim he threw it.  Presently there was a wide line
of jute and paper extending from the main blaze across to the
next box.  Then another began to pile up in an opposite
direction, toward the door.  The fire ran greedily along these
two lines of fuel.

Meantime the room was no longer so clearly lighted as at
first.  For the smoke billowed up to the low roof, and in
thick waves poured out through the small ventilator.  Such of
it as could not find this means of outlet doubled back
floorward, filling the room with chokingly thick fumes which
wellnigh blinded and strangled the man and blotted out all
details of shape and direction.

But already Gavin Brice had slipped to the floor, his
thin-shod feet planted in the midst of the blaze, whose flames
and sparks licked eagerly at his ankles and legs.

Following the trail of fire which led to the box.  Gavin
strode through the very center of this blazing path, heedless
of the burns.  Well did he know the snakes would shrink away
from actual contact with the fire.  And he preferred surface
burns to a fatal bite in ankle or foot.

As he reached the box its corners had already caught fire from
the licking flames below.  Heaving up the burning receptacle.
Brice looked under it.  There lay the rusty key, just visible
through the lurid smoke glare.  But not ten inches away from
the far side of it coiled a moccasin, head poised
threateningly as the box grazed it under Gavin's sharp heave.

Stooping, Brice snatched up a great bunch of the flaming paper
and flung it on the serpent's shining coils.  In practically
the same gesture he reached with lightning quickness for the
key.

By a few inches he had missed his hurried aim for the
moccasin.  He had intended the handful of fire to land on the
floor just in front of it, thus causing it to shrink back.
Instead the burning particles had fallen stingingly among its
coils.

The snake twisted its arrow-shaped head as if to see what had
befallen it.  Then catching sight of Brice's swooping hand it
struck.

But the glance backward and the incredibly quick withdrawal of
the man's hand combined to form the infinitesimal space which
separated Gavin from agonizing death.  The snake's striking
head missed the fast-retreating fingers by less than a hair's
breadth.  The fangs met on the wards of the rusty key Brice
had caught up in his fingertips.  The force of the stroke
knocked the key clatteringly to the floor.

Stepping back.  Brice flung a second and better aimed handful
of the dwindling fire in front of the re-coiling reptile.  It
drew back hissing.  And as it did so.  Gavin regained the
fallen key.

Wheeling about choking and strangling from the smoke, his
streamingly smarting eyes barely able to discern the fiery
trail he had laid.  Brice ran through the midst of the red
line of embers to the door.  Reaching it he held the key in
one hand while the sensitive fingers of the other sought the
keyhole.

After what seemed a century he found it, and applied and
turned the key in the stiff lock.  With a fierce shove he
pushed open the door.  Then as he was about to bound forth
into the glory of the sunset, he started back convulsively.

One moccasin had evidently sought outer air.  With this in
view it had stretched itself along the crack of light at the
foot of the door.  Now as the door flew wide the snake coiled
itself to strike at the man who had all but stepped on it.

Down whizzed the narrow strip of iron Gavin had wrenched from
the box as a possible weapon.  And, though the impact cut
Brice's fingers afresh, the snake lay twisting wildly and
harmlessly with a cloven spine.

Over the writhing body sprang Gavin Brice and out into the
sandy open, filling his smoke-tortured lungs with the fresh
sunset air and blinking away the smoke-damp from his stinging
eyes.

It was then he beheld running toward him three men.  Far in
the van was Roke--his attention no doubt having been caught by
the smoke pouring through the ventilator.  The two others were
an undersized conch and a towering Bahama negro.  All three
carried clubs, and a pistol glittered in Roke's left hand.

Ten feet from the reeling Gavin.  Roke opened fire.  But, as he
did not halt when he pulled trigger, his shot went wild.  Before
he could shoot again or bring his club into action.  Brice was
upon him.  Gavin smote once and once only with the willowy metal
strip.  But he struck with all the dazzling speed of a trained
saber fencer.

The iron strip caught Roke across the eyes, smartingly and
with a force which blinded him for the moment and sent him
staggering back in keen pain.  The iron strip doubled
uselessly under the might of the blow, and Gavin dropped it
and ran.

At top speed he set off toward the dock.  The conch and the
negro were between him and the pier, and from various
directions other men were running.  But only the Bahaman and
the little conch barred his actual line of progress.  Both
leaped at him at the same time, as he came dashing down on
them.

The conch was a yard or so in front of the negro.  And now the
fugitive saw the Bahaman's supposed cudgel was an iron crowbar
which he wielded as easily as a wand.  The negro leaped and at
the same time struck.  But, by some queer chance, the conch, a
yard ahead of him, lost his own footing in the shifty sand
just then and tumbled headlong.

He fell directly in the Bahaman's path.  The negro stumbled
over him and plunged earthward, the iron bar flying harmless
from his grasp.

"Good little Davy!" apostrophized Brice, as he hurdled the
sprawling bodies and made for the dock.

The way was clear, and he ran at a pace which would not have
disgraced a college sprinter.  Once, glancing back over his
shoulder, he saw the Bahaman trying blasphemously to
disentangle his legs from those of the prostrate and wriggling
Davy.  He saw, too, Roke pawing at his cut face with both
hairy hands, and heard him bellowing confused orders which
nobody seemed to understand.

Arrived at the dock Gavin saw that Standish's launch was gone.
So, too, was the gaudy little motorboat wherein Rodney Hade
had come to the key.  Two battered and paintless motor-scows
remained, and one or two disreputable rowboats.

It was the work of only a few seconds for Brice to cut loose
the moorings of all these craft and to thrust them far out
into the blue water, where wind and tide could be trusted to
bear them steadily farther and farther from shore.

Into the last of the boats--the speedier-seeming of the two
launches--Gavin sprang as he shoved it free from the float.
And, before the nearest of the island men could reach shore,
he had the motor purring.  Satisfied that the tide had
caught the rest of the fleet and that the stiff tradewind was
doing even more to send the derelict boats out of reach from
shore or from possible swimmers he turned the head of his
unwieldy launch toward the mainland, pointing it northeastward
and making ready to wind his course through the straits which
laced the various islets lying between him and his destination.

"They'll have a sweet time getting off that key  tonight," he
mused in grim satisfaction.  "And, unless they can hail some
passing boat, they're due to stay there till Hade or Standish
makes another trip out ....  Standish!"

At the name he went hot with wrath.  Now that he had achieved
the task of winning free from his prison and from his jailors
his mind swung back to the man he had rescued and who had
sought his death.  Anger at the black infamy burned fiercely
in Brice's soul.  His whole brain and body ached for redress,
for physical wild-beast punishment of the ingrate.  The impulse
dulled his every other faculty.  It made him oblivious to the
infinitely more important work he had laid out for himself.

No man can be forever normal when anger takes the reins.  And,
for the time, Gavin Brice was deaf and blind to every motive
or caution, and centered his entire faculties on the yearning
to punish Milo Standish.  He had fought like a tiger and had
risked his own life to save Standish from the unknown
assailant's knife thrust.  Milo, in gross stupidity,  had
struck him senseless.  And now, coldbloodedly, he had helped
to plan for him the most terrible form of death by torture to
which even an Apache could have stooped.  Small wonder that
righteous indignation flared high within the fugitive!

Straight into the fading glory of the sunset.  Brice was
steering his wallowing and leaky launch.  The boat was
evidently constructed and used for the transporting of fruit
from the key to the mainland.  She was slow and of deep
draught.  But she was cutting down the distance now between
Gavin and the shore.

He planned to beach her on the strip of sand at the bottom of
the mangrove swamp, and to make his way to the Standish house
through the hidden path whose existence Milo had that day
poohpoohed.  He trusted to luck and to justice to enable him
to find the man he sought when once he should reach the house.

His only drawback was the fear lest he encounter Claire as
well.  In his present wrathful frame of mind he had no wish to
see or speak with her, and he hoped that she might not mar by
her presence his encounter with her brother.

Between two keys wallowed his chugging boat and into a stretch
of clear water beyond.  Then, skirting a low-lying reef, Gavin
headed direct toward the distant patch of yellowish beach
which was his objective.

The sun's upper edge was sinking below the flat skyline.
Mauve shadows swept over the aquamarine expanse of rippling
water.  The horizon was dyed a blood-red which was merging into
ashes of roses.  On golden Mashta played the last level rays of
the dying sun, caressing the wondrous edifice as though they
loved it.  The subtropical night was rushing down upon the
smiling world, and, as ever, it was descending without the long
sweet interval of twilight that northern lands know.

Gavin put the tub to top speed as the last visible obstacle
was left behind.  Clear water lay between him and the beach.
And he was impatient to step on land.  Under the fresh impetus
the rolling craft panted and wheezed and made her way through
the ripples at a really creditable pace.

As the shadows thickened Brice half-arose in his seat to get a
better glimpse of a little motorboat which had just sprung
into view from around the mangrove-covered headland that cut
off the view of Standish's mainland dock.  The boat apparently
had put off from that pier, and was making rapid speed out
into the bay almost directly toward him.  He could descry a
figure sitting in the steersman's seat.  But by that ebbing
light, he could discern only its blurred outline.

Before Gavin could resume his seat he was flung forward upon
his face in the bottom of his scow.  The jar of the tumble
knocked him breathless.  And as he scrambled up on hands and
knees he saw what had happened.

Foolish is the boatman who runs at full speed in some of
the southwestern reaches of Biscayne Bay--especially at
dusk--without up-to-date chart or a perfect knowledge of the bay's
tricky soundings.  For the coral worm is tireless, and the making
of new reefs is without end.

The fast-driven launch had run, bow-on, into a tooth of coral
barely ten inches under the surface of the smooth water.  And,
what with her impetus and the half-rotted condition of her
hull, she struck with such force as to rip a hole in her
forward quarter, wide enough to stick a derby hat through.

In rushed the water, filling her in an incredibly short time.
Settling by the head under the weight of this inpouring flood
she toppled off the tooth of reef and slid free.  Then with a
wallowing dignity she proceeded to sink.

The iron sheathing on her keel and hull had not been strong
enough in its rusted state to resist the hammerblow of the
reef.  But it was heavy enough, together with her big metal
steering apparatus, to counterbalance any buoyant qualities
left in the wooden frame.

And, down she went, waddling like a fat and ponderous hen,
into a twenty-foot nest of water.

Gavin had wasted no time in the impossible feat of baling her
or of plugging her unpluggable leak.  As she went swayingly
toward the bottom of the bay he slipped clear of her and
struck out through the tepid water.

The mangrove swamp's beach was a bare half-mile away.  And the
man knew he could swim the intervening space with ease.  Yet
the tedious delay of it all irked him and fanned to a blind
fury his rage against Milo.  Moreover, now, he could not hope
to reach the hidden path before real darkness should set in.
And he did not relish the idea of traversing its blind mazes
without a glimmer of daylight to guide him.

Yet he struck out, stubbornly, doggedly.  As he passed the
tooth of coral that had wrecked his scow the reef gave him a
painful farewell scrape on one kicking knee.  He swam on
fuming at this latest annoyance.

Then to his ears came the steady purr of a motorboat.  It was
close to him and coming closer.

"Boat ahoy!" he sang out treading water and raising himself as
high as possible to peer about him through the dusk.

"Boat ahoy!" he called again, shouting to be heard above the
motor's hum.  "Man overboard!  Ten dollars if you'll carry me
to the mainland!"

And now he could see against the paler hue of the sky.  the
dark outlines of the boat's prow.  It was bearing down on him.
Above the bow's edge he could make out the vague silhouette of
a head and upper body.

Then into his memory flashed something which the shock of his
upsetting had completely banished.  He recalled the motorboat
which had darted, arrow-like, out from around the southern
edge of the mangrove swamp, and which he had been watching
when his scow went to pieces on the reef.

If this were the same boat--if its steersman chanced to be
Milo Standish crossing to the key to learn if his murderplot
had yet culminated--so much the better!  Man to man, there
between sea and sky in the gathering gloom, they could settle
the account once and for all.

Perhaps Standish had recognized him.  Perhaps he merely took
him for some capsized fisherman.  In either event, a swimming
man is the most utterly defenseless of all creatures against
attack from land or from boat.  And Gavin was not minded to
let Standish finish his work with boat-hook or with oar.  If
he and his foe were to meet it should be on even terms.

The boat had switched off power and was coming to a
standstill.  Gavin dived.  He swam clean under the craft,
lengthwise, coming up at its stern and farthest from that
indistinct figure in the prow.

As he rose to the surface he caught with both hands the narrow
overhang of the stern, and wi

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