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 she called, noting the bandage on his head had been replaced by a neat strip of plaster.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 subst.i.tute 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 embarra.s.sment 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 appet.i.te, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.sing, "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."