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.
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 frombeing 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.
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 startwhenever 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.