Black Caesar"s Clan.
by Albert Payson Terhune.
FOREWORD
A wiggling, brainless, slimy atom began it. He and trillions of his kind. He was the Coral Worm ("Anthozoa," if you prefer).
He and his tribe lived and died on the sea-bottom, successive generations piling higher on the skeletons and lifework--or the life-loafing, for they were lazy atoms--of those that went before. At last the coral reef crawled upward until in uncharted waters it was tall enough to smash a wooden ship-keel.
Then, above the surface of the waves it nosed its way, grayish white, whalebacked. From a hundred miles distant floated a cigar-shaped mangrove-bud, bobbing vertically, through the ocean, until it chanced to touch the new-risen coral reef.
The mangrove, alone of all trees, will sprout and grow in salt water. The mangrove"s trunk, alone of all trunks, is impervious to the corrosive action of the sea.
At once the bud set to work. It drove an anchor-root into the reef, then other roots and still others. It shot up to the height of a foot or two, and thence sent thick red-brown roots straight downward into the coral again.
And so on, until it had formed a tangled root-fence for many yards alongsh.o.r.e. After which, its work being done, the mangrove proceeded to grow upward into a big and glossy-leaved shade-tree, making buds for further fences.
Meanwhile, every particle of floating seaweed, every dead fish or animal, all vegetation, etc., which chanced to wash into that fence-tangle, stayed there. It is easier for matter, as well as for man, to get entangled in mangrove roots than to get out again.
The sun and the rain did their work on this decaying stuff.
Thus, soil was formed, atop the coral and in the hollows scooped out of its surface by wind or tide.
Presently, a coconut, hurled from its stem in the Bahamas or in Cuba, by a hurricane, set its palmleaf sail-sprout and was gale-driven across the intervening seas, floating ash.o.r.e on the new-risen land. There it sprouted. Birds, winds, waves, brought germs of other trees. The subtropical island was complete.
Island, key, reef--reef, key, island--with the intervening gaps of azure-emerald water, bridged, bit by bit, by the coral,--to-day a sea-surface, to-morrow a gray-white reef, next day a mangrove hedge, and the next an expanse of spectacular verdure and glistening gray-white sand.
So Florida was born.
So, at least, its southern portion was born, and is still in daily process of birth. And, according to Aga.s.siz and many another, the entire Peninsula may have arisen in this fashion, from the green-blue sea.
Dredge and shovel are laboring hard to guide or check the endless undersea coral growth before bay and channel and lagoon shall all be dry land. The wormlike, lazy, fast-multiplying Anthozoa is fighting pa.s.sively but with terrific power, to set at naught all man"s might and wit.
In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter tourists throng by the hundred thousand. In time, too, these sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida is a Career, not a Resort.
As in every land which has grown swiftly and along different lines from the rest of the country, there still are mystery and romance and thrills to be found lurking among the keys and back of the mangrove-swamps and along the mystic reaches of sunset sh.o.r.eline.
With awkward and inexpert touch, my story seeks to set forth some of these.
Understand, please, that this book is rank melodrama. It has scant literary quality. It is not planned to edify. Its only mission is to entertain you and,--if you belong to the action-loving majority, to give you an occasional thrill.
Perhaps you will like it. Perhaps you will not. But I do not think you will go to sleep over it. There are worse recommendations than that for any book.
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE.
"Sunnybank,"
Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
BLACK CAESAR"S CLAN
CHAPTER I
THE HIDDEN PATH
Overhead sang the steady trade wind, tempering the golden sunshine"s heat. To eastward, under an incredibly blue sky, stretched the more incredibly multi-hued waters of Biscayne Bay, the snow-white wonder-city of Miami dreaming on its sh.o.r.es.
Dividing the residence and business part of the city from the giant hotels, Flagler Avenue split the ma.s.s of buildings, from back-country to bay. To its westward side spread the shaded expanse of Royal Palm Park, with its deep-shaded short lane of Australian pines, its rustling palm trees, its white church and its frond-flecked vistas of gra.s.s.
Here, scarce a quarter-century ago, a sandspit had broiled beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, gra.s.sless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-gra.s.s had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful White City had sprung up.
It was Sunday morning. From the park"s bandstand, William J.
Bryan was preaching to his open-air Sunday School cla.s.s of tourists, two thousand strong. Around the bandstand the audience stood or sat in rapt interest.
The Australian-pine lane, to the rear, was lined with all manner of automobiles, from limousine to battered flivver.
The cars" occupants listened as best they could--through the whirr of sea-planes and the soft hum of Sabbath traffic and the dry slither of a myriad grating palm-fronds in the trade-wind"s wake--to the preacher"s words.
The s.p.a.ce of shaded gra.s.s, between lane and hotel-grounds and bandstand, was starred by white-clad children, and by men who sprawled drowsily upon the springy turf, their straw hats tilted above their eyes. The time was mid-February. The thermometers on the Royal Palm veranda registered seventy-three. No rain had fallen in weeks to mar the weather"s perfection.
"Scientists are spending $5,000,000 to send an expedition into Africa in search of the "missing-link"!" the orator was thundering. "It would be better for them to spend all or part of that money, in seeking closer connection with their Heavenly Father, than with the Brutes!"
A buzz of approval swept the listeners. That same buzz came irritatingly to the ears of a none-too-sprucely dressed young man who lay, with eyes shut, under the shifting shade of a giant palm, a hundred yards away. He had not caught the phrase which inspired the applause--thanks to the confusion of street sounds and the multiple dry rattle of the palm-fronds and the whirring pa.s.sage of a sea-plane which circled above park and bay. But the buzz aroused him.
He had not been asleep. p.r.o.ne on his back, hat pulled over his upper face, he had been lying motionless there, for the best part of an hour. Now, stretching, he got to his feet in leisurely fashion, brushed perfunctorily at his rumpled clothes, and turned his steps toward the double line of plumy Australian pines which bordered the lane between hotel grounds and avenue.
Only once did he hesitate in his slouching progress. That was when he chanced to come alongside one of the cars, in the long rank, drawn up in the shade. The machine"s front seat was occupied by a giant of a man, all in white silk, a man of middle age, blonde and bearded, a man who, but for his modern costume, might well have posed as a Norse Viking.
The splendid breadth of shoulder and depth of chest caught the wanderer"s glance and won his grudging approval. Thence, his elaborately careless gaze shifted to the car"s rear seat where sat a girl. He noted she was small and dainty and tanned and dressed in white sport-clothes. Also, that one of her arms was pa.s.sed around the shoulder of a big young gold-and-white collie dog,--a dog that fidgeted uneasily and paid scant heed to the restraining hand and caressing voice of his mistress.
As the shabby man paused momentarily to scan the car"s three occupants, the girl happened to look toward him. Her look was brief and impersonal. Yet, for the merest instant, her eyes met his. And their glances held each other with a momentary intentness. Then the girl turned again toward the restless dog, seeking to quiet him. And the man pa.s.sed on.
Moving with aimless slowness--one is not long in Southern Florida without acquiring a leisurely gait the lounger left the park and strolled up Thirteenth Avenue, towards the bridge which spans the Miami River and forms a link between the more thickly settled part of the town and its southerly suburbs.
As he crossed the bridge, a car pa.s.sed him, moving rapidly eastward, and leaving a choky trail of dust. He had bare time to see it was driven by the Norse giant, and that the girl had moved to the front seat beside the driver. The collie (fastened by a cord running through his collar from one side of the tonneau to the other) lay fidgetingly on the rear seat.
For miles the man plodded on, under the wind-tempered sunshine. Pa.s.sing Brickell Avenue and then the last of the city, he continued,--now on the road, now going cross-country,--until he came out on a patch of broken beach, with a background of jungle-like forest.
The sun had gone beyond the meridian mark during his ramble southward, and the afternoon was hurrying by. For the way was long, though he had tramped steadily.
As he reached the bit of sandy foresh.o.r.e, he paused for the first time since stopping to survey the car. An unpainted rowboat was drawn up on the beach. Half way between it and the tangle of woodland behind, was a man clad only in undershirt and dirty duck trousers. He was yanking along by the scruff of the neck a protesting and evidently angry collie.
The man was big and rugged. Weather and sea had bronzed him to the hue of an Arab. Apparently, he had sighted the dog, and had run his boat ash.o.r.e to capture the stray animal. He handled his prize none too gently, and his management was calling forth all the collie"s resentment. But as the man had had the wit to seize the dog by the scruff of the neck and to keep himself out of the reach of the luckless creature"s vainly snapping jaws, these protests went for nothing.
Within thirty feet of the boat, the dog braced himself for a new effort to tear free. The man, in anger, planted a vigorous kick against the collie"s furry side. As his foot was bare, the kick lost much of its potential power to injure.
Yet it had the effect of rousing to sudden indignation the dusty youth who had stopped on his tramp from Miami to watch the scene.
"Whose dog is that?" he demanded, striding forward, from the shade, and approaching the struggling pair.