Black Caesar's Clan Part 12

"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 gra.s.sy little s.p.a.ce on the far edge of the lawn. In the center of the s.p.a.ce 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 stalact.i.tes 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. Pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 foresh.o.r.e, countless miles of waving gra.s.s, 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 foresh.o.r.e, 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 sh.e.l.l.

"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 s.h.i.+ning midway down its sh.o.r.eline. 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 s.h.i.+ps onto the rocks, and then loot them.

At least that was the everyday (or everynight) amus.e.m.e.nt 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-s.h.i.+ps. 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 s.h.i.+p showed fight or seemed too tough a handful the pirates. .h.i.t on a surer way of capture. They'd turn tail and run. The merchant s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps and off what cargo washes ash.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e a few miles south of here. The conchs got busy with the plunder.

The cargo was a veritable G.o.dsend to them. They used the sewing machines as anchors for their boats. Another time a box of shoes washed ash.o.r.e. 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 s.h.i.+ps ash.o.r.e by flares. But the lighthouse service has pretty well put a stop to that."