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?"