Miami Noir: The Classics

Pineland by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Goulds

(Originally published in 1925)

Larry Gibbs was thankful that the roughness of the road took all his attention, because he had no idea what to say to a woman whose son has just been hanged. She sat like a stone beside him in the front seat of the car. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her cheap black skirt covering her bony knees and the worn toes of her shoes to which still clung some particles of sand from around Joe McDevitt’s grave. The heavy black veil which muffled her hat and her face gave off the acid smell of black dye. Her hands in black cotton gloves with flabby tips that were too long for her fumbled with a clean folded handkerchief in her lap.

All around them the white brilliance of the Florida noon poured down upon the uneven road from the burial place, caught on the bright spear points of palmettos and struck into nakedness the shabby houses among stumps of pine trees of this outskirt of Miami. The light and the hot wind seemed whiter and hotter for the figure of Sarah McDevitt in her mourning.

It was Jack Kelley, the man who had turned state’s evidence on the Pardee gang case, who had told Larry he would loan him an automobile if he would take Sarah McDevitt home. It was the same Jack Kelley who had started the fund to provide Joe McDevitt’s body with decent burial. He had seen to it that his own figure had a prominent place in the newspaper photographs of the grave, which next morning would assure all Dade County that the Pardee gang, including the McDevitts, was at last broken up, either by being driven from Florida or doing endless terms in prison camps, like George McDevitt; or like Joe here, made safe for Southern progress with a stretch of rope, a pine coffin and a few feet of Florida marl.

“Go on now,” Jack Kelley had said, pushing at Larry with large, firm pushes. “There’s a story in Sarah McDevitt yet. The last of her boys gone and she going home to sit and listen to her pine trees, see? A nice little front-page story, see? And you might just mention the canned goods I’ve put in the back of the car for her. Enough to last her a month. Here you are, Sarah McDevitt. Larry Gibbs will take you home, see?”

Larry wondered miserably if she were crying behind that stuffy veil. He had not seen her face yet. He had never seen her before.

She had not come to the trial, although he wondered a little why Joe McDevitt’s lawyer had not brought her in for her effect on the jury. He thought of Joe McDevitt as he had been then, lounging, copper-haired, a sleek reddish animal, his veins crammed with healthy life. He had not shown much interest even when the facts about the bank robbery and the cashier’s death were made damningly evident.

Now Joe McDevitt was dead. It had made a tremendous impression on Larry. It was his first big court case since he had been on the paper. He had written home to his mother that he was seeing the real bedrock of life at last. He pictured his mother reading it in her breakfast room in Brookline, turning the pages of his letter with that little look of amused horror on her distinguished face. She would hope he would not be obliged to come in close contact with miserable creatures in jails.

He had written with affected carelessness about interviewing McDevitt the man-killer, but secretly he was thankful that he had not had to cover the hanging this morning. The other court reporter had done that. But this business of taking home the mother was almost as bad. It made him feel perfectly rotten. She was so quiet.

“That road,” she said to him suddenly, and he flushed and jerked the car around on the way she had pointed. He was taken completely by surprise that her voice could be so clear and firm.

“This is... this is the Larkins Road, isn’t it?” he asked hastily to prevent the silence from forming again. “I didn’t know it was surfaced yet.”

But she said nothing, and he continued to stare forward at the road paralleling the shine of tracks, the shine and glitter of palmettos on the other side. The sky ahead was steely and remote, and it made his eyes ache. A corner of her veil snapped outside the car. Every once in so often her hat joggled forward over her forehead and she pushed it back and wiped her face with the wad of her handkerchief. He was somehow sure that it was not tears she wiped.

He turned to ask her if she would not like to have him stop somewhere and get her a glass of water, and saw for the first time that her skin was pale and clammy with heat. Her mouth, with the deep soft wrinkles on it of an old woman, was half open and panting. But as he spoke she closed her lips in a tight line and looked at him straight out of faded gray eyes within faded lashes. There was nothing feeble in her glance. She pulled off her hat abruptly and her thin gray hair blew against the brown skin of her forehead.

When they had passed by the stores and railway station of Larkins she began slowly to take off her black gloves. She rolled them into hard balls, working and working at them sightlessly until he thought she would never let them alone. Her hands were curiously like the look in her eyes, vigorous in spite of the blotched brown skin stretched over the large-boned knuckles.

“What did Jack Kelley think he was going to get out of sending me home with a lot of canned goods?” she asked suddenly.

“Why — I don’t know,” Larry said. “He — I think he was just — I mean I imagine he wanted to show you he was sorry that you — that your—”

“Huh!” she said, and her voice was dryly deliberate. “Any time Jack Kelley spends money you can bet he knows right well where he’s going to get something for it. I guess maybe he figured you’d put something in the paper about it.”

Larry was always sharply conscious when his fair skin reddened. “But, Mrs. McDevitt, I wouldn’t write anything you wouldn’t want me to write. I—”

“I could tell you to write something Jack Kelley wouldn’t want you to write, about the time he tried to do me out of my homestead. I guess he wouldn’t relish that much.”

“When was that?” Larry leaped eagerly to the question. He felt easier, now that she was talking. The only sense of strain of which he was aware was the slow dry way she talked, as if her tongue were swollen and sticky. “Tell me about that, won’t you?”

“Oh — it wasn’t much. Nothing to put in the paper. He just wasn’t so smart’s he thought he was. It was one time about two years after I come down on my land here. McDevitt’s mother up in Vermont wrote me that George was awful sick. I’d been working in Miami, waiting on table like I did in the six months they let you live off your homestead, and it was time I went back on it, but I got permission from the land agent to leave long enough to go north and look after my children.

“In Jacksonville I met this Jack Kelley between trains, that I’d seen coming into the restaurant time and again, and the minute he saw me he knew I was supposed to be on my land. ‘Well, Sarah McDevitt,’ he says to me. ‘So the pineland was too much for you, was it?’

“‘When you see me giving up my pineland you can have it yourself, Jack Kelley,’ I says to him, and thought no more of it. But don’t you believe it but that man turned right around and come back to Miami and started to file a counterclaim against my property. And now he thinks he can fool me with canned goods. Jack Kelley. Huh!”

“But he didn’t get your land, did he?”

“Of course he didn’t, the big fool. He didn’t have a chance. I had my permission right enough, and the day after he’d filed the claim he come down to look at my house, and a good neighbor of mine that see him coming fired off a six-shooter in the air, and he said Jack Kelley ran like a whitehead. And up in Miami Mr. Barnes that owned the restaurant told me he’d go to court himself to see I kept my place. He said Jack Kelley’d ought to be run out of the county for trying to take a woman’s land from her. I don’t mean you should put that in the paper, though.”

Larry pondered regretfully the news value of that story. But she was quite right that he couldn’t print it. The paper wouldn’t stand for it, and besides it was libel.

They were running past pineland now, and he turned and stared at the passing ranks. They were like no pine trees he had ever seen in his life, these Caribbean pine. Their high bare trunks, set among palmetto fans that softened all the ground beneath them, rose up so near the road that he could see the soft flakes of color of their scaly bark, red and brown and cream, as if patted on with a thick brush. Their high tops mingled gray-green branches, twisted and distorted as if by great winds or something stern and implacable in their own natures. Their long green needles were scant, letting the sky through. They were strange trees, strange but beautiful. The brilliance of the sun penetrated through their endless ranks in a swimming mist of light. They were endlessly alike, endlessly monotonous, and yet with an endless charm and variety.

Every tree held its own twist and pattern; every tree, even to the distant intermingled brown of trunks too far away to distinguish, was infinitely itself. Sometimes the pine woods came so near the road he could smell their sunny resinous breath. Sometimes they retreated like a long, smoky, green-frothed wall beyond house lots and grapefruit groves or open swales of sawgrass or beyond cleared fields where raw stumps of those already destroyed stood amid the blackness of a recent burning. Against the horizon their ranks rushed cometlike and immobile into the untouched west. He felt the comprehension of them growing upon him — the silence of their trunks, the loveliness of their tossed branches, the virginity of their hushed places, in retreat before the surfaced roads and filling stations, the barbecue stands and signboards of the new Florida.

“They’re wonderful, aren’t they, the pines?” he said abruptly. “There’s something beautiful and fresh about them, different from any trees I’ve ever seen.”

The woman beside him took a great deep breath, as if what he said had released something in her.

“I remember the first time I went to see my place,” she said. “Twenty years ago. In those days the nearest road was six miles away. You could take a horse and carriage from Miami to a place near Goulds where the road branched. Then you’d have to walk across country to where my land began. It wasn’t my land then, though. The land agent had it surveyed and told me where the boundary stob was. The palmetto was deeper than it is now, but I was younger and nothing was too much for me. When I’d walked a ways through the palmetto under those pines and come to the place where they said would be good for a clearing, I just stood still and listened, I don’t know how long. It was so still you could hear little noises a long ways off, like a bird rustling up on a branch or an insect buzzing.

“The tops of the trees were higher up than these here, and they didn’t move any. The light was all soft and kind of bright, and yet green and dim too. Those trees were the quietest things I ever see. It did you good just to feel them so quiet, as if you’d come to the place where everything began. I couldn’t hardly believe there was places outside where people were afraid and worried. I just — I tell you I just started crying, but not to hurt. I never was one for crying, but this was just good easy tears, the way you cry when you’re so happy you don’t believe it’s true.”

Larry hardly dared to speak, keeping his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Yet when she continued to maintain the silence into which she had fallen he ventured, “What made you come down here homesteading in the first place, Mrs. McDevitt?”

“I was in the freeze years ago, up in Orange County.” Her reply came with a little effort, as if she had lost her present self in a sturdy dark-haired woman, wiping her eyes all alone among silent acres of pineland. “Eh, law!” she sighed. “That was a long time. McDevitt bought an orange grove and we were froze out.”

“Tell me about that,” Larry insisted.

Presently she went on speaking, with her chin on her breast and her eyes staring forward at the road racing and racing toward them, between the straight gleaming rails and the dusty palmettos, the few pines, half dying, with patent-medicine signs tacked to them, that followed this part of the road. She talked as if it were as easy as thinking — easier. “McDevitt would have it that we mustn’t sell the oranges until the season was later and the prices better, although I told him to sell. The fruit was coloring wonderful that winter. ’Ninety-four and five. In those days in Orange County the orange trees were tall and dark and glossy, on strong thick trunks. When you walked in an orange grove the dark leaves met overhead and you walked on bare brown earth in a kind of solid shadow, not like the pines that strain the light through clear and airy. Up in the dark branches you could see the oranges in clusters, growing gold color like there was sun on them. I never saw fruit like ours that winter. It seemed like the branches would break with it. Then came the big freeze. There never was one like it before and there never has been since.

“That was about the last difference McDevitt and I had.”

Larry felt a pricking in the back of his neck at the even depth of hatred in her voice, the first naked emotion she had shown.

“He was a smooth one, a smooth, smiling, hateful man, with easy ways and eyes boring in for the weak place in you. It was what made him furious, not finding mine. ‘I’ll be stronger than you are,’ I’d say to myself often and often. ‘And stiller and more of a man. You see if I won’t.’ That was even as soon as after George was born. I’d grit my teeth and bear that look in his eyes until he’d fling off and leave me a week or two for spite. We come down to Orange County from Vermont state, where his mother was. He got this orange grove with money my own mother left me, but I knew he’d never be one for holding it. So I held it.”

The car dipped and rose on the swinging levels of the road. The sun was beginning to crawl down from its zenith and the burning white of the sky was turning a faint flower-petal blue. The wind from the invisible sea to eastward came to them in steady, freshening gusts.

“Turn here,” she said. “That winter he had a great beard that was the color of the oranges, and he’d sit around barefooted on the porch of the shack we had and comb it. Joe was — Joe was a year old then.” Her tongue thickened as she spoke the name for the first time. Larry heard the sticky parting of her lips. The car was running almost silently on a dirt road in the shadow of pines that seemed stronger and more dense than those by the main highway.

“I was a thick stumpy woman then, and the heat behind all those trees there in the middle of Florida was like a tight hand over your lungs. But I’d leave the baby and little George on a mattress in the breeze-way between the two rooms of the house and go out to see that the nigras were working. McDevitt wouldn’t ever. He’d sit there smiling, with those eyes over his beard and never sweated. The heat was terrible. That’s what made the fruit ripen early. I was wild with nerves at it, but I wouldn’t let McDevitt know. Only when he come home from Orlando and said he’d got an offer to sell the crop on the trees for ten thousand, only he’d decided not to, that night I had to go out and walk up and down the road that had a place where there wasn’t any orange trees. That night I thought I’d choke with orange trees.

“Up around the house the shadow of them was black and thick, and the smell of the new bloom that was coming here and there up among the yellowing fruit sickened you. There was a starlight that fell wet and glittery like knives on the leaf edges. The next day McDevitt went off somewhere to spite me because I wanted him to sell, and left me alone. I’d never let him guess how afraid I was to be alone. I guess that’s why I married him when he come along when Ma died. Or maybe he guessed and thought I’d beg him to take me away.

“He would have liked me to beg him to. But I never let on that my knees were like string to see him go. He turned at the gate and smiled at me over that orange-colored beard with his stone-white teeth and his eyes that were like wires boring into you, and I shut my mouth tight and let him look. So he stopped smiling and went, and I was there with the two children and four nigras living down a ways in a shack in the grove, and the days got hotter. I would of sold the crop, only I couldn’t find the man that made the offer. But everybody in Orlando, at the bank and everywhere, said to hold on, because prices were going up. Then one day it begun to get cold.

“It came on in the morning, and by afternoon it was so cold the children shivered, and I had to put two-three extra shirts on them. In all the groves up and down the road they began to light fire pots and start bonfires to keep the oranges from feeling it. You could smell the smoke and the blossoms in the chilly air. The sky was heavy and gray-looking and there wasn’t any wind, and the smoke drifted and hung between the long dark rows of trees. But still it kept getting colder. Late that afternoon I went out and stopped the nigras from lighting any more fire pots. I could see it wasn’t going to do any good. I told them to cut down a couple of old trees to keep themselves warm in their houses that night and had them bring me some of the wood too.

“Then it got dark sudden and I gave the children some bread and milk and put them to bed with all the bedclothes over them, and I put a shawl around my knees and one over my shoulders and sat close to the stove and fed it with orange wood. All night long I sat there and it kept getting colder. About midnight I could tell it was freezing outside, because the trees begun to crack and snap. Then pretty soon you could hear thumps on the ground where the oranges were freezing and falling off. I set there and heard them and knew that every cent I had in the world but two dollars was being frozen up. Then some more oranges would thump down.

‘’Next morning when I unbolted my front door and looked out the ground was all covered with frost that was melting in the sun, and everywhere you looked the edges of the leaves were blackened, and on the ground carloads and carloads of oranges were scattered. The crop was ruined. Every orange was hurt. And all the way into Orlando and all over Orange County and all the way up to Jacksonville it was the same way. It wasn’t just me that was ruined. The whole state was. I’ve often wondered why we had to get caught in the one big freeze Orange County ever had.

“Well, when McDevitt heard how things were, he told a man that was coming to Orlando to tell me that I could have the grove. He said he was tired of oranges anyway and thought he would go to Texas and I prob’ly wouldn’t see him anymore. So there I was. I was scared so when the crop went I didn’t hardly know what to do, but what McDevitt did, put the ginger in me I needed.

“Maybe he thought he’d find the weak place in me that way, but it made me mad enough to do anything. So then I found that the trees weren’t dead, only the fruit. There was maybe a chance to save next year’s bloom. So I went into the bank at Orlando and borrowed some money to keep going on, and almost everybody else that wasn’t too discouraged done the same thing. Things looked bad, but they weren’t too bad.

“Until along in February when the second freeze came. The sap had begun to come back with the heat that shut down again and the bloom was forced beyond its time. People were getting real cheerful, like people get in a fruit country, living on next year’s promise, and Orlando looked prosperous. And then the second freeze came. I sat up all night again and listened to the crackling of the boughs. There wasn’t any oranges to thump down, but somehow now it made it all the worse. You couldn’t hear anything but the crackling and snapping of wood, but you could feel the chill that meant that next year’s hopes were dying.

“My fire went out and I was chilled through, and yet even when it come daylight and the sun straggled in the window I kept sitting there by the stove, not daring to go and look. There wasn’t a sound outside, nobody going by in the road, and the nigras not making any noise at all. I just sat there all huddled up until little George woke up and ran and opened the door and told me to look.

“You never saw anything like it in your life. It was the abomination of desolation. It wasn’t only that the leaves were black and shriveled and fallen and the new bloom gone. The trees themselves were frozen stiff and the sap had frozen and then split the trees down to the roots; and there they lay, looking like an earthquake or a tornado had hit them. Every tree was killed, every one of them, down to the roots. And when the sun was hot and the warmth was coming back all the country smelled of rottenness. People went around with mouths that spoke but couldn’t smile, and they could look with their eyes, but it was like they weren’t looking at anything.

“It was like death. Business was stopped. All the banks were ruined. Then the people begun to go away. They could have stood it without money, but they couldn’t stand it without the hope of their trees that they’d worked so hard over and put their last cent in. They went away from the blackened rotting groves and they left their houses wide open and maybe food on the table and bread in the oven, and in a week it was like everybody had died. Some went back to places they’d come from in the North or the old South, and some went to Texas and Oklahoma.

“But some of the young men that didn’t have all the spirit taken out of them were talking about going farther south, way down in South Florida that nobody thought was fit to live in on account of swamps, down to this new place Miami on the coast where they were bringing the railroad. These men said that maybe down there they could start new orange groves, and there was gov’ment land you could homestead.

“If I hadn’t been so mad with McDevitt I don’t see how I could have done it, but I begun to think if a man could take up a homestead maybe I could, and then I’d put a grove in and show him I was a smarter man than he was, if I was a woman. So I wrote to his mother that lived in Vermont state and told her just how it was, and she wrote back she was sorry McDevitt had been so mean and she’d take the children for a while. She was a good, kind woman and I guess McDevitt took after his father. There was some people going back to Vermont state from Orlando that could take the children to her. So that’s how I took up the land. Perhaps I made a mistake. There’s plenty of people has made good money growing oranges in Orange County since then. Go slow here. We’re coming to my gate.”

There was a straggling grove of grapefruit at the left, which presently revealed a road more like a path. Up this, in answer to her hand, Larry turned. The weeds were long under the trees. Beyond that was unused cleared land that may have been used to grow vegetables. But beyond that still the pines began again, pressing down almost into the faint roadway, rising endlessly to each side and ahead, larger and more stately than any Larry had yet noticed. The palmetto around their roots was all untouched. Between their ranks the distance was smoky with crowding trunks. Superb trees, they seemed to be the very ancestors and originals of all the others they had passed. The house stood in a small clearing, perhaps the half acre prescribed by the government for homesteaders. It was made of pine logs and there was a well beside it and a small garden. When he stopped the car Larry found himself listening intently. It was as she had said. You could hear only little noises faint and far away. When she was walking from the car to the house steps, stiffly, with her black hat and veil trailing from her hand and her heavy black skirt bunched up as she had been sitting on it, Larry asked, “Where do you want me to put these canned goods, Mrs. McDevitt?”

At first he thought she had not heard him, but at the top step she turned and looked back at him and her thin lips stretched in a mirthless smile. “You take those things back to Jack Kelley,” she said, and stood eyeing him. Something in the flush on his face must have reached to her, for she said, “Come and set down, don’t you want to? I’m going to have me a cup of coffee. You’ve been — you’re a right kind young man and it’s a long ways back.”

When she came out again with a pot of coffee in her hand, and cups, Larry had been sitting on the porch steps, thinking of the pine trees. Their airy quiet was a healing and a blessing. He had had a moment of feeling sure that if he could only be still enough himself, hands still, eyes still, heart still, perhaps he would enter into the knowledge of something deep and hidden and wonderful, as if he were standing on the threshold of a slow moment of revelation, a moment for which being had been created. The feeling went when he heard her behind him, and he stretched and looked about him with a feeling of good happiness. The long light of afternoon slanted through brown trunks across the grass of the clearing. Beyond the tossing green of pine tops the sky was glowing with a blue at once misty and intense, and a great cloud mass, as if carved from a soft creamy marble, was lifting up and up into unimaginable free heights, where the great clean wind ran westward from the sea.

She gave him a cup of coffee, and he took it absently, noticing that she had changed her heavy black for a shapeless dress of some gray cotton stuff that made her look thinner and smaller. She sat in a rocking chair at his shoulder and creaked it softly now and then.

“But you must have had a terrible time clearing all this, Mrs. McDevitt. And living here all by yourself. How did you ever do it?”

She creaked reflectively. “I had a six-shooter,” she said, and then stopped again. “And it’s wonderful how you toughen up to using a grubbing hoe. I grubbed all that out myself, after the men cut the trees. I made them leave all those pine trees, though. I didn’t mind being alone here. It got so I didn’t like to be anywhere else. Once when the rains were bad I waded in from Goulds with water up to my waist and a sack of Irish potatoes on my shoulder. Mr. Barnes didn’t want me to go.

“I was up in Miami, waiting on table to make enough money to put grapefruit in. A man come in and said all this part of the country was swept away with a cloudburst, and I couldn’t rest until I’d come to see. My house hadn’t been finished long. But when I got here, sopping wet to my armpits, the house was all high and dry. This land is higher’n anything around here. So I stayed here for a week until the water went down, and worked around and lived on Irish potatoes. I was glad to get back here from town. It was getting too crowded to like it. I finished clearing my half acre and an old nigra that was around here then showed me how to put in sweet potatoes.”

The chair creaked. “That was kind of funny. I wasn’t afraid of much of anything by that time but snakes and McDevitt. Staying out here by myself nights somehow I got to hating him worse and worse, and every once in a while if I’d hear somebody coming up that road I’d think what I’d do if it was him. Well, this morning — just about when my house was finished and the well was dug, it was early in the morning. I always got up at the peak of day, and it wasn’t hardly light when I thought I heard McDevitt stumbling around the well. I don’t know what got into me. I was all of a-tremble, and I went to the door and fired all six shots up in the air over the man I could see down by the well.

“All he did was kind of crouch down, and when I went over to look, it was this old nigra, and he was so scared he was as white as I was. ‘Law, Miss Sarah,’ he says to me. ‘No man’s goin’ to ever steal up on you in the nighttime,’ and he would of run when he got his breath, but I started laughing and I told him he needn’t to be scared. All he wanted was a drink of water, anyway. Uncle Joseph, they used to call him, and when he showed me about the sweet potatoes I put a lot in just over there where the soil’s good, and I sold them to Mr. Barnes in Miami. Then I put in tomatoes for a while, and did right well with them, so I didn’t have to work in town the six months they allow you off your land. I did all the work myself, so it didn’t cost much.”

Larry had leaned back against the post so that he could look up at her and at the soft sky too. The morning and what had happened to Joe McDevitt seemed very far off to him. He thought perhaps they began to seem so to her, too, for suddenly her face wrinkled into a network of silent laughter. Her narrowed eyes were brightly vigorous and all the lines of her face were pleasantly relaxed. Her hands were relaxed on her knee.

“Talk about funny, though. I have to laugh every time I think of it. It shows what a fool I was in those days. When I’d made enough money in Miami to get my house built down here I was crazy to get into it. I wanted my own roof and my own pine trees. Well, it was all done but the front door, and that had to come down from Miami special on a wagon. I’d been sleeping over to the Marshs’, those good neighbors I told you about ten miles up the road, and I’d got my furniture in, a stove and a bedstead and one-two things McDevitt’s mother sent down to me, and I made up my mind I wasn’t going to wait any longer for that front door.

“I was just going ahead and live in my house, anyway. So when night come I put on my six-shooter, with the belt over my nightgown, and I shoved the headboard of the bed right up against the open door. It’s one of those high wooden headboards. I went to sleep and slept like a log, not thinking of anything. Well, ’long about three-four o’clock in the morning I woke up with a jump and lay there listening to how still it was and thinking how far I was from anything and how dark it was, and me all alone in the middle of it. Well, it come over me all of a sudden that anybody could crawl right through that door in the space under the bed. I never thought of that before. And while I was laying there thinking that, something screamed way out in the woods.

“Well, say — scared? I was so scared I was cold and stiff, and I could see things moving in the dark all around me and things crawling and creeping out of the dark under that bed. I didn’t dare to move or creak the bed springs, and there was my six-shooter that had worked around under my hip and was boring a hole right through me. When that thing screamed I thought I’d just die right there. You could hear wild cats sometimes in those days, only then I didn’t know what it was. And the next morning I went over to Marshs’ and stayed there until that door got there, and I had three bolts put on, and you bet I used them. But I can laugh over that now any time I think of it.

“And two days later was the time I shot all the snakes I ever see around here. That was another funny thing. I can’t bear snakes. I was sitting in this chair inside my door, with the door open — that was before this porch was built. I was sewing something and I had my six-shooter in my lap. And all of a sudden I just kind of saw something on the floor out of the tail of my eye, and before I ever turned to see what it was, a kind of cold feeling went all over me and, thinks I, ‘That’s a snake.’ Before I knew exactly what I was doing I grabbed my gun and I shot all six shots at that thing I saw, and it was a rattlesnake as thick as your wrist, and not two feet from my foot.

“The first time I got a good look at it, it was as dead as a piece of string, and there was bullet holes through it and around it right into my new floor. You can go in and see where they are right now. And that afternoon there was a man here and we were planting some orange trees, for I thought I’d see how they’d do here. He says, ‘Look, there’s a snake,’ and I turned around, and sure enough there was another one. I guess maybe two snakes in one day was too much for me, for everything went all kind of black and I didn’t know what I was doing until I see the man looking and laughing at me. I was killing that snake with a stick and then stamping and dancing on its head like I was crazy, with my six-shooter bumping on my hip. He says he never see anything so funny in his life the way I looked, but I didn’t remember much of anything, I was so blind mad. I always did hate a snake. But that was about all I ever saw on my place. Though that time I told you about when it rained so hard and I waded in from Goulds there were moccasins on some of the stumps. You don’t see them hardly any now, except out in the deep Glades.”

The chair creaked. The high great pillar of cloud was turning a soft pink. A mockingbird, tail and wings all a-cock, landed on the ground before the steps with a flirt and stared at them first out of one eye and then the other, and flew off as suddenly as he had come, with a flash of white wing bars and three or four notes of song like sweet impertinent words.

Larry fumbled in his mind for the right question. “Were you — did you stay here all alone, always?” he asked cautiously. “You were very brave, I think.”

Her profile in the softening light was bold and bony, he saw as he stared up at her. The gray hair blew straight back from her forehead and the scanty knob of it behind hardly altered the shape of her head. The skin over the cheekbones was smooth in spite of the soft wrinkles about the mouth and eyes. Her body was a bony shapelessness under the cotton dress, but her head, from the angle at which he gazed, seemed fine and distinguished. There was about it that sexless look which approaching age sometimes takes on, in which men seem like old women and old women like delicate, bony old men. She looked like a worn old statesman, wise, weary, patient.

He found himself thrilling to all this she had been telling him, as if the courage and drama of it had stirred deeply his sensitive imagination. She was indeed a better man than McDevitt, this shapeless old woman. She was unique, she was magnificent. Staring at her he saw what it was really to be a pioneer, a woman, lonely, afraid of snakes, sustained by no dream of empire, but only by a six-shooter and the enduring force of her own will. He felt at once humbled and exalted at this glimpse of the dumb, inevitable thrust forward of the human spirit. Her name was Sarah McDevitt and her sons were—

As if in the brooding into which she had fallen she had come to a similar place in her thoughts, she turned her bright gray eyes on him slowly, and he remembered that he had asked her a question.

“I sent for the boys as soon as I could,” she said. “George was big for his age and Joe was — Joe wasn’t a baby anymore. They come down with some people that were coming to Miami, and I met them there. I was afraid they wouldn’t recognize me. I was sunburned more than they had ever seen me and I guess I was a lot heavier. George said I was taller, and maybe I was. Carrying boxes of tomatoes makes you stand straight, and grubbing palmettos and planting and hoeing and picking kind of stretches your spine. I couldn’t seem to sleep much the night the boys got here. I’d have to keep getting up and light the lamp to look at them all over again. Sleeping that heavy way children have, they looked beautiful. George was black-haired and heavy, like my father, and Joe was all kind of gold color then. He used to — he used to wrinkle up his nose and laugh right out loud in his sleep.”

Larry studied carefully the nearest knot hole. He felt a stinging behind his eyes at the careful monotony of her voice. Her words were labored. And yet when he looked up again there was only on her eyelids that look of a worn, distinguished old statesman with silence lying heavy upon her mouth.

“It didn’t seem — I guess it was pretty lonely here for the boys after a while,” she went on slowly. “They’d been to school in Vermont state and there wasn’t any school here nearer than Coconut Grove. They were used to playing with children, and I was busy from daylight to dark. George liked to help with the tomatoes sometimes, but Joe was too little at first. They got to like to roam around the pine woods. Once George shot a wild cat. I gave them the orange trees if they’d take care of them, but they didn’t take to that much, and anyway, oranges aren’t so good here as in Orange County. I saw that right off, and besides, I didn’t want to bother with them.

“Times when my tomatoes failed or the crop was short I could always go over to Goulds or Peters and work in the tomato-packing house. It was easier money than waiting on table in Miami, and I could walk home nights. Sometimes the boys liked to pack a little when the season was good and I saved up money for them. I knew they’d have to go to school sometime, but I kind of kept putting it off. There’s a lot of company in a couple of kids fighting and hollering and yoo-hooing around. I’d got used to baking big batches of bread and pies and having to patch trousers. And besides, I was afraid of McDevitt.

“It didn’t seem any time at all before they was big. Time goes fast down here, with the pine trees. There isn’t much difference, summer or winter. In the winter the warm dark comes early and there’s maybe cool nights, and once in two-three years maybe a slight touch of frost, and there isn’t any rain, and the grass and leaves are yellow-green and brittle. In the summer you can hear the rains come booming and hissing in from the sea way out beyond and trampling down the dry grass. And afterward everything springs up juicy and green and the palmetto blossoms are sweeter than orange bloom, and little yellow and purple wildflowers grow up around the pines, and on a west wind the mosquitoes come. The nights are like pieces of black-and-white velvet laid on the earth, and the mockers go crazy, and all kinds of little birds that come from hot countries farther south sing all night in the moonlight.

“The old leaves fall off the trees and the next day the new leaves are rich and glossy and the young pine trees carry long white candles on their tips. But summer and winter smooth into each other so you don’t notice how time goes creeping, except by watching young trees grow taller and boys grow big and try to act like men. Springs they would get excited to see the fires that start in the dry time leaping and roaring off in the pines. Falls, when the big rains filled up the roads, and the swales and all low places and everything was sopping, they’d run around splashing in it and having fun with plank boats. But all the time I knew they ought to be in school.

“The country around here was changing too. When they’d put the railroad through, gangs of men camped out not ten miles from here, and the boys liked to hang around the camps. That was what started me to send them to school. I was afraid they’d learn things that wouldn’t be good for them, and I guess they did. Then the railroad was being finished way to Key West and the roads were better and people begun to come through and buy up land and talk of grapefruit groves and the tomato prairies.

“So I sold some of my land nearest to the main highway and sent the boys to Miami, where a woman I knew that used to cook for Mr. Barnes promised she’d board and room them and darn their stockings and look out for them. Sometimes Saturdays and Sundays they’d come down here or I’d go in and see them there. But they didn’t like school so well as they thought they would and George was crazy to go to work. I didn’t like him to. All my people in Massachusetts were educated and I wanted my boys to have all the learning they could. But the next two years my tomato crop failed, once with too much wet and the next year with nail-head rust, and I had to get a job cooking for a woman over to Perrine.

“So George worked awhile and then Joe wanted to go to work too. They worked around at different things, so I could give up cooking and next year put in another crop of tomatoes. That was about all we thought about raising down here then. And that crop was fine. It was a big year and I got George and Joe down here to help me picking and carrying to the packing house, and I paid them the same wages as anybody, and it was real nice. They were big strapping boys then and it seemed like everything was coming all right at last. We’d get home and light the lamp and I’d cook them a good hot supper and see them lean over the table and eat hearty.

“Then McDevitt come back. I can see it just as plain as if it was yesterday. After supper the boys were setting on the porch with their shoes off and smoking and I come to the door after the dishes was done, and just as I stood there McDevitt walked out of the dark into the patch of lamplight by the steps. I knew it was him even before he looked up at me and smiled with his teeth shining under a long red mustache and his eyes gleaming like hot wires. His beard was gone and he had a good suit of clothes on and a white collar. He put a leather bag on the step and stood looking at me, and then the house and at the big boys staring at him, and my knees begun to shake with the cold that come over me.

“‘Well, Sarah McDevitt,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve done pretty well here,’ and he started to come up the steps.

“I couldn’t say anything at all at first, and then all of a sudden I called out to him, ‘Don’t you dare to set foot on this porch, Peter McDevitt, or I’ll shoot off my gun at you. This is my land and my house, and I got made a free dealer right and proper under the Florida law so’s you couldn’t get any of it. You’ve got no more right here than a dog has, and you can just go back the way you came.’

“He stood there and looked at me, with his nose coming down over his mustache and the veins standing out in his forehead where he’d taken his hat off, and I could see he was older than he used to be and not so smooth. Because now he couldn’t cover up how mad he was. But he stood still in his tracks, with his head and shoulder held careful and stiff, the way a tomcat stands that hasn’t made up his mind how to jump, except he’d turn his eyes and look at the boys standing there with their mouths open, and then back at me, a hateful, sliding sort of look. If he’d been a snake I couldn’t have hated him worse.

“‘Well, well, Sarah,’ he says at last, changing his feet easy, ‘I see you know how to take care of yourself all right. But it’s a long ways back to Miami and I haven’t seen my boys since they was little, and any father has a right to talk to his own children. You haven’t got the heart to keep me from doing that just a minute, have you?’

“I had, though, and I would of if I could. But when he smiled at me like that I knew I couldn’t do anything more with him than what I had, so I slammed the door and walked up and down the kitchen, trying not to listen to the sound of their men voices talking easy on the porch, and trying to hear what they said, and trying to make myself think I didn’t care and that it would be all right anyhow as long as he couldn’t get my property away from me. I remember I stood at the sink and kept wiping and wiping the same clean plate over and over again until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“But when I opened the door again McDevitt and the two boys were standing out in front with just their feet in the patch of light from the door, and he was talking to them and they were laughing. Pretty soon he went away and George carried his bag for him, and they must have stood awhile talking down by the gate, for the boys didn’t come back for a while. It seemed like hours. When they did come they walked and acted real careless, joking and talking loud and cutting up with each other. But when they stood at the foot of the steps and looked up at me, standing stiff in the doorway, their eyes were shining and hard and they wouldn’t quite look at me, the way men act when they think their womenfolks are standing in their way. If I’d been cold before, I went frozen all over then, for I see that McDevitt had turned their minds away from me a little so that there was something hard and cold come between them and me. They didn’t want to talk to me much, and after they went to bed I heard them talking low and laughing to themselves at something.

“The next day they said they wanted to go to Miami, and I gave them some money and let them go. I couldn’t have said anything to them against it, any more than I could have begged McDevitt to come back that time. It felt as if something inside of me was a hard lump that wouldn’t let me feel anything. I wasn’t going to have McDevitt say I’d kept them from seeing him. It was just as it used to be when he’d try to find out if I had a weak place he could get hold of, and I gritted my teeth to keep from showing it to the boys.

“They didn’t come back for two days, and I didn’t expect them to. I had a couple of nigras working for me then and I made them cut down all the orange trees I had and burn them. I couldn’t stand the look of them. I had them drag the trees down to a cleared space at the edge of my land and the fire showed red through the pine trees. That night the boys came back as if nothing had happened, walking up the path, with the glare through the pines showing faint and McDevitt walking between them.

“I wouldn’t let him set foot on the porch. ‘I told you once and I tell you again, Peter McDevitt,’ I says, ‘that I won’t have you on my place. The boys can do what they like. They’re old enough to know better. But you, I don’t have to have, and I won’t have, and you can make up your mind to it.’

“George come up to me and put his arm around me and his black head, like my father’s, was way taller than mine. ‘Aw, Ma,’ he said to me, ‘Grammer McDevitt used to say you were too hard. Dad never done as much harm to you as you thought. Joe and I think you’d ought to let him come and talk things over with you. He’s had a hard time, too, and it would be nice to let bygones be bygones.’

“I didn’t feel his arm around me no more than if it was a piece of iron, and I looked down at Joe standing there beside McDevitt, and he was as tall as McDevitt. For the first time I see that his hair that had been gold color when he was a baby had turned to be copper-colored like his father’s, and his eyes were the same red-brown when he narrowed them. The two of them stood and looked at me, and George dropped his arm and looked at me, and McDevitt’s eyes begun to shine and his nose came down over his mustache and his teeth under it were white and shining like gravestones, and he smiled as if at last he’d found the place where I was weak, and I knew it.

“That was when it seemed as if I didn’t know what I was doing, except that I heard somebody telling them they could all three go away and never let me see them again as long as they’d rather have him than me. Then I saw them walking back down the road, all of them, as if they were hurrying, and I ran in and got my six-shooter and ran down the path after them, and I was shooting over their heads. When I’d shot all six shots I threw my gun away and went on stumbling in the dark after them, down through the pine woods where there was a reddish light from the bonfire still flickering.

“At the gate I saw McDevitt go on down to a car he had there, but Joe turned around and started to come back toward me, and George stopped and watched him, and then he began to walk toward me too. I stopped and watched them come, with their backs to McDevitt, and it seemed as if the hard thing in me was melting and softening and warming me all over. I come to myself all of a sudden and I could see Joe’s face and George’s, just as clear, without any kind of dark mist over them, and it seemed to me that it didn’t really matter how weak anybody thought I was as long as I had my boys. I started to walk to them, too, almost crying, and I was just going to beg them to come back anyway, that I’d do anything they wanted me to. That was when Henry Marsh drove up and turned in my gate, passed the boys and leaned out and shouted at me that the pine woods in back of the place where the orange-tree fire was had caught and it was threatening the rest of my pines and on his side clear up to his grapefruit grove. I didn’t understand him at first, until he kept saying that the fire was creeping toward the pines. And I looked, and sure enough all that light wasn’t just the bonfire but the palmetto flaring up and popping and flying and the flames climbing like ragged ribbons all the way up one dead tree that stood nearest. If I hadn’t been so taken up with McDevitt I would have known the difference long ago.

“Well, there wasn’t anything else to do but go and fight the fire. I guess George and Joe must have turned around and gone back with McDevitt, because I didn’t see them anymore that night. I rushed up to the house for some burlap bags, and then Henry Marsh and I drove as near the fire as we could get. I could see Marsh’s men black against the flames thrashing at it. A fire in the pines down here isn’t the same as a forest fire anywhere else. The fire clings to the woody soil and the oily palmettos and once in a while it gets up into a tree. If there’s a dead branch or a rotten place the whole tree burns up then. The bark is made tough and heavy like scales, so that the fire can’t hurt it if the tree is sound, and even young pines, if there isn’t anything the matter with them, will burn only a little and not be killed. But where there’s an old tree with its insides dead and rotted the fire leaps at it and the whole tree bursts into flame like it was tinder and the light of it brightens everything all around. Before you know it the tree crashes down and throws burning branches and ends of fire clear across a road or a fire path, and a new patch of palmetto will crackle up and blaze as if it was covered with kerosene.

“Through the smoke we could see the ground covered with blazing stumps and little edges of fire and an outer ring of flames where the fire was running toward my pine. Then a big tree that was burning fell like a fiery flag, falling straight toward the finest stand of them between there and the house, and I just went crazy. What I’d been with snakes or with McDevitt wasn’t anything to that, I was so scared the pines would go. Henry Marsh said I snatched a wet burlap out of his hand and went at that burning tree single-handed, stamping and beating, with my skirts and my shoes in the flying embers, until he said it was a miracle I didn’t catch fire myself. But all I remember was the heat on my face and a kind of wildness in me to get that fire out, no matter what happened or what it cost.

“And then suddenly that tree was out and there wasn’t any more creeping ring of flame, but only black stumps and branches and the ground hot and smoking underfoot. The men had stopped the fire up on the other side next to Henry Marsh’s grove and there was only some palmettos still burning in the middle and the smoldering earth where the fire had crept down into the peat and would smolder that way for days until it burned itself out. They got me back to my house and fixed up my burned hands and legs and feet, and I slept that night as if I was dead.

“The next day I sent word up to George and Joe that they could come back and see me when they wanted to, but I never said anything about McDevitt. And although they come back sometimes, it wasn’t any use. I guess I knew it all along. Something had changed in them. McDevitt hung around Miami and I knew the boys saw him and were with him, although he never tried to come out here again himself. That night finished something for me. I knew I’d never dare to say his name to them again or ask them what they were doing. I never did. They got jobs in town, I guess, and when they come to see me I was glad to see them, but I never treated them like I’d used to, and they weren’t the same with me.

“They brought me money sometimes, and I wouldn’t take it and I wouldn’t ask them how they got it, although they seemed to have plenty and dressed real nice. But I guessed things. They got to act more and more like McDevitt, smile like he did and not move their heads when they’d look at things, but only their eyes, and talk smooth and shifty. But sometimes they’d come back, or one of them alone, all tired out, and stay for a while, and all that would slip off them and they’d be just like my boys again, laughing and joking. I’d go in nights when they were asleep and look at them, great long heavy boys, the black one and the red one, sprawled over the bed.”

The quick tropic twilight was driving the yellow light of the sun out of the clearing between the pine trees. The sky overhead was lifting and receding into a high thin dome of green quivering light into which the prickle of a star came suddenly.

Larry Gibbs did not dare to tum his head to look at her, stone-still in her chair. Her chair itself did not creak anymore. But when she spoke again, except for the stiffness of her lips, her voice was deliberate and clear and dry.

“So I never let them or McDevitt see that I had a weak place, never once. I never said anything to them or pleaded with them. I never let them see me cry. I didn’t cry. McDevitt went away finally, I guess. I guess maybe he got driven out of town. And the things that happened then — happened.”

There was a long silence. Her voice said at last, in a breathless murmur, “And they can tell McDevitt — I haven’t — cried — yet.”

There was a man coming up the roadway to the house. Larry turned and watched him come. He was glad he would not have to say anything now. The man was thin and aimless-looking, and as he came up to the steps Larry saw he fumbled with his hat and had red rims to his blue eyes.

“Evenin’, Mis’ McDevitt,” he said uncomfortably. “Mis’ Marsh wanted I should step over and see if you needed anything, or if you wouldn’t like to sleep to our house tonight.”

Larry stood up slowly and turned to look at her. She was rocking again, but her profile was white parchment stretched tight over the boldness of her mouth and chin and her eyes were like smudges deep within their sockets.

“You’re a right good neighbor, Henry Marsh,” she said. “Tell Lizzie I don’t want anything, thank you, and I wouldn’t be comfortable anywheres else but here. I want to be up early in the morning. There’s a man coming with some avocado seedlings. I thought I’d see how they’d do here. This young man is going back now. Maybe he’d give you a ride back as far as your house. I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure.”

Her chair creaked slowly as the two men went toward Larry’s car. Driving back along the dark road Larry spoke only occasionally to the thin man, who seemed much affected. He told himself it was ridiculous to be affected so much himself, and yet he could not forget her sitting there on that dark porch. He found he had dreaded, in leaving her, to see some evidence of the defeat and dissolution of what in her he had found splendid, that spirit which by repeated and hard-won victories had strengthened itself, had learned to do without all the ordinary happinesses. He saw now that he had had nothing to dread. She had maintained herself, like an old pine through many burnings, by the enduring soundness of its own wood. That, Larry saw, was his story, if he could put into English his feeling of so important and so abiding a thing.

Luck by Lester Dent

City Yacht Basin

(Originally published in 1936)

The fish trembled its tail as the knife cut off its head, then red ran out of it and made a mess on the planks and spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had tried to hold to the dock edge.

Sail put the palm of his own hand in the mess.

The small policeman came from shore. He had shoved through the small green gate with the discreet sign, Private Yachts — No Admittance, at the shore end of the swanky pier, and was under the neat green canopy, tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. His leather and brass glistened in the light. He was cautious enough to walk in the middle of the narrow long pier, but did enough stamping with his feet to show he was the law.

When he reached Sail, he stopped. His cap had a cock. His lower lip was loose on the left side, as if depressed by a pipe stem that wasn’t there. He was young, bony and brown.

He asked, “That you give that yell?”

Sail picked up the hook and wet line. He held the hook close to his left palm. He grimaced at the small oozing rip in the brown callus of the palm. It was about the kind of a hole the fishhook would have made.

“Yeah?” the cop said vaguely. “You snagged the hand on a hook, eh? Made you yell?” The policeman toed the fish head’s open mouthful of snake-fang teeth.

“Barracuda,” he said, but not as if that was on his mind.

Red drops came out of the ripped palm, fattened on the lower edge, came loose and fell on the dock. Sail picked the fish up with his other hand. When he stood his straightest, he was still shorter than the small cocky policeman.

The officer splashed light on Sail. He saw the round jolly brown features of a thirtyish man who probably liked his food, who would put weight on until he was forty, and spend the rest of his life secretly trying to take it off. Sail’s hair might have been unraveled rope, and looked as if it had been finger-combed. Some of the black had been scrubbed out of his black polo shirt. Washings had bleached his black dungarees; they fitted his small hips tightly and stopped halfway below the knees. Bare feet had squarish toes. Weather had gotten to all of the man a lot.

The officer hocked to clear his throat. “They don’t eat barracuda in Miami. Not when you catch the damn things in the harbor, anyhow.”

He didn’t sound as if that was the thing bothering him, either.

Sail asked, “You the health department?”

The little policeman filled Sail’s eyes with light. He said, “If that was a crack—” and changed to, “Was it you yelled?”

“Any law against a yell when you get a hook in your hand?”

The policeman popped his light into Sail’s face again. Derision was around Sail’s blue eyes and in the warp of his lips.

Loud music was coming from the moonlight excursion boat at the south end of the City Yacht Basin, but a barker spoiled the effect of the music, if any. Two slot machines alongside the lunch stand at Pier Six ate sailor nickels and chugged away.

A hundred million dollars’ worth of yachts within a half-mile radius, the Miami publicity bureau said. Little Egyptian-silk-sail racing cutters that had cost a thousand a foot. A big three-hundred-foot Britisher, owned by Lady Something-or-other who only had officers with beards. And in-between sizes. Teak, mahogany, chromium, brass. Efficiency. Jap stewards as quiet as spooks. Blond Swede sailors. Skippers with leather faces, big hands and great calm.

The policeman pointed his flashlight beam at the boat tied to the end of the dock. The light showed the sloping masts, the black canvas covers over the sails, the black, neat, new-looking hull. Life preservers tied to the mainstays had Sail on them in gold leaf.

“What you call that kind of a boat?” the cop asked.

“Chesapeake five-log bugeye,” Sail said. “Her bottom is made out of five logs drifted together with Swedish iron rods. The masts on bugeyes always rake back like that. She’s thirty-four feet long in the water. You’ll have trouble beating a bugeye for knocking around shallow water, and they’re pretty fair sea—”

“Could it cross the ocean?”

“She has.”

“Yeah? My old man’s got the crazy idea he wants to go to the South Seas. He’s nuts about boats.”

“It gets you.”

“This one yours?”

“Yes,” Sail said.

“How old is it?”

“Sixty-eight years old.”

“T’hell it is! That’s older’n my old man. I don’t think he’d want it.”

“She’ll take you anywhere,” Sail defended.

“What’s she worth?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” Sail said.

The policeman whistled. Then he laughed. He did not say anything.

Sail said, “There are some panels in the cabin, genuine hand carvings by Samuel McIntire of Salem. Probably they were once on a clipper ship. That’s what makes her price stiff.”

The cop did not answer. He switched off his light.

“All I can say is you let out a hell of a funny yell when you catch a fish,” he said.

He took pains to stamp his feet while he walked away. By the time Sail got the effects of the flashlight out of his eyes, the officer was out of sight.

Sail held his hands close to his chest, fingers spread, palms in. There was barely enough breeze to make coolness against one side of his face. The music on the moonlit sailboat stopped. The barker was silent. Over in the Bayfront Park outdoor auditorium a political speaker was viewing something with alarm. After he had felt his hands tremble for a while, Sail went to his boat.

The boat, Sail, rode spring lines at the dock end. She had a thirty-four-foot waterline. Twelve-foot beam, two-foot draft with centerboard up, seven with it down. She was rigged to be sailed by one man, all lines coming aft.

The interior was teak, with inset panels of red sanders, fustic and green ebony, all hand-carved by a man who had died in 1811. How Samuel McIntire panels came to be in the bugeye, Sail did not know, but he had been offered a thousand dollars for each year of age for the boat and was hungry broke when he turned it down. It was not a money matter. Some men love dogs.

Sail slapped the fish into a kettle in the galley and, hurrying, put most of his right arm through a porthole, grasped a line, took half hitches off a cleat, and let the line go. The line snaked quietly down into the water, following a sinking live-box and its contents of live fish and crawfish.

Sail looked out of the hatch.

The young policeman had come quietly back to where the fish had bled and was using his flashlight. He squatted. After a while, he approached the dock end, moseying. Too carefully. When his flashlight brightened the bugeye’s black masts and black sail covers, Sail was in the galley, making enough noise cutting up the fish to let the cop know where he was and what he was doing.

Sail waited four or five minutes before putting his head out of the hatch. The cop had gone somewhere silently.

Sail was still looking and listening for the policeman when he heard the man’s curse and the woman’s cry, short, sharp. The man’s curse was something of a bray of surprise. The sounds came out of Bayfront Park, between the waterfront yacht basin and Biscayne Boulevard. Sail, not stirring, but watching the park, saw a man running among the palms. Then the young policeman and his flashlight were also moving among the palms.

During the next five minutes, the policeman and his flash were not still long enough for him to have found anything.

Sail stripped naked, working fast once more. His body was rounding, the hair on it golden and long, but not thick. He looked at his belly as if he didn’t like it, slapped it and sucked it in. The act was more a habit than a thought. He put on black jersey swim trunks.

Standing in the companion looking around, Sail scratched his chest and tugged the hair on it. His fingers twisted a little rattail of the chest hair. No one was in sight. He got over the side without being too conspicuous about it.

The water had odor and the usual things floated in it. He swam under the dock, searching. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in just a little, so things in the water were not moving away.

The pier had been built stout because of the hurricanes. There was a net of cross timbers underneath, and anything falling off the south side of the dock would drift against them. Sail found what he was seeking on the third dive.

He kept in the dark places as he swam away with it.

The little island — artificial, put there when they dredged the harbor — was darkly silent when Sail swam laboriously toward it. Pine trees on the island had been bent by the hurricanes, and some torn up. The weeds did not seem to have been affected.

Sail tried not to splash as he shoved through the shallows to the sand beach. He towed the Greek underwater. Half a dozen crabs and some seaweed clung to the Greek when Sail carried him into the pines and weeds. The knife sticking in the Greek, and what it had done, did not help. The pines scratched and the weeds crunched under the Greek when Sail laid him down. It was very dark.

Pulpy skins in a billfold were probably greenbacks, and stiffer, smaller rectangles, business cards. Silver coins, a pocketknife, two clips for an automatic. The automatic holster empty under the Greek’s left armpit. From inside the Greek’s coat lining, another rectangle, four inches wide, five times as long, a quarter of an inch thick. It felt like hardwood. The Greek’s wristwatch still ticked.

Sail put the business cards and the object from the coat lining inside his swim trunks, and was down on his knees cleaning his hands in the sand when the situation got the best of him. By the time he finished being sick, he had sweated profusely.

The water felt cold as he swam back the way he had come — under the docks and close to the seawall — with the Greek.

Sail clung to Sail’s chain bobstay until all the water had run off him that wanted to run off, then swung aboard and moved along the deck, keeping below the wharf level, and dropped down the hatch. He started to take the bathing suit off, and the girl said, “Puh-lease.”

She swung her legs off the forward bunk. Light from the kerosene gimbal lamp did not reach all of her. The feet were small in dark blue sandals which showed red-enameled toenails. Her legs had not been shaved recently, but were nice.

Pink starting on Sail’s chest and spreading made his tan look dark and uncomfortable, and he chewed an imaginary something between his large white front teeth as he squinted at the girl. He seemed about to say something two or three different times, but didn’t, and went into the stateroom and got out of the swim trunks. The shadow-wrapped rest of her did not look bad as he passed. He tied a fish sinker to the trunks and dropped them through a porthole into the bay, which was dredged three fathoms deep here. He put on his scrubbed black clothes.

The girl had moved into the light. The rest of her was interesting.

“You probably think I’m a tart,” she said. “I’m not, and I wish you’d let me stay here awhile longer. I have a good reason.”

Sail scratched behind his right ear, raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, stalked self-consciously into the galley, pumped freshwater in a glass and threw it on the galley floor, then stepped in it. His feet now left wet tracks such as they had made when he came aboard. He seemed acutely conscious that his efforts to make this seem a perfectly sensible procedure were exaggerated. His hands upset a round bottle, but he caught it. He set it down, picked it up again, asked:

“Drink?”

She had crossed her legs. Her skirt was split. “That would be nice,” she said.

Sail, his back to her, made more noise than necessary in rattling bottles and glasses and pinking an opener into a can of condensed milk. He mixed two parts of gin, one of crème de cacao, one of condensed milk. He put four drops from a small green bottle in one drink and gave that one to the girl, holding it out a full arm length, as if he didn’t feel well-acquainted enough to get closer, or didn’t want to frighten her away.

They sipped.

She said, “It’s not bad without ice, really.”

“I did have an electric ice box,” he told her, as if excusing the lack of ice. “But it and this salt air didn’t mix so well.”

Her skirt matched her blue pumps, and her yellow jersey was a contrast. Her long hair was mahogany, and done in a bun over each ear, so that her long oval face had a pure, sweet look. She drank again. Her blue leather handbag started to slip out of the hollow of her crossed legs and she caught it quickly.

Sail put his glass down and went around straightening things which really didn’t need it. He picked up the News off the engine box. It was in two parts. He handed one part to the girl. That seemed to press the button. She threw the paper down and grabbed her blue purse with both hands.

“You don’t need to be so goddamn smart about it!” she said through her teeth.

She started to get up, but her knee joints did not have strength, and she slid off the bench and sat hard on the black battleship linoleum. Sail moved fast and got his plump hands on the blue purse as she clawed it open. A small bright revolver fell out of the purse as they had a tug-of-war over it.

“Blick!” the girl squealed.

Blick and a revolver came out of the oilskin locker. The gun was a small bright twin to the girl’s. Blick’s Panama fell off slick mahogany hair, and disarranged oilskins fell down in the locker behind him. Blick had his lips rolled in until he seemed to have no lips. He looked about old enough to have fought in the last war.

“Want it shot off?” he gritted.

Sail jerked his hand away from the girl’s purse as if a bullet was already headed for it. He put his hands up as high as the cabin carlins and ceiling would allow. His mouth and eyes were round and uneasy, and the upper part of his stomach jumped a little with each beat of his heart, moving the polo shirt fabric.

Blick gave Sail a quick search. He was rough. His lips were still rolled in, and a sleeve was still jammed up on one arm, above a drop of blood that was not yet dry.

The girl started to get up, couldn’t. She said, “Blick!” weakly.

Blick, watching Sail, threw at her, “You hadda be a sucker and drink with him!”

The girl’s lips worked over some words before sounds started coming. “...was... I... know he... it doped.”

Blick gritted at Sail, “Bud, she’s my sis, and if she don’t come out of that, I wouldn’t wanta be you. Help me get her goin’!”

Blick dropped his sister’s purse and gun in his coat pocket, got his Panama, then took the girl’s right arm, letting Sail look into the little gun’s muzzle all the while. “Help me, bud!”

Sail took his hands down. Sweat wetness was coming through his washed black polo shirt. He watched Blick’s eyes and face instead of watching the gun. They walked the girl up the companion and onto the dock. Blick put his hand and small revolver into a trouser pocket.

“We’re tight. Stagger!”

They staggered.

The orchestra on the moonlit excursion boat was still trying to entice customers for the moonlight sail. Yacht sailors, some of them with a load, stood in a knot at the end of the lunch stand, and out of the knot came the chug of the slot machines. Blick was tall enough to glare over his sister’s head at Sail. His glare was not bright.

“What’d you give her?”

Sail wet his lips. The sweat had come out on his forehead enough to start running.

“Truth serum.”

“You louse!”

Two sailors, one without his shirt, went past, headed for the slot machines.

Blick said, “Bud, I think I got you figured. You’re a guy Andopolis rung in. He’d still try to get a boat and another guy.”

Sail squinted out of one eye. Perspiration was stinging the other.

“Andopolis was the one who didn’t digest the knife?”

“You ain’t that dumb!”

“Was he?”

“You know that was Abel!”

Sail said, “Believe it or not, I’m guessing right across the board. Abel was to do the dirty work while you and the girl hung around on shore. Abel tried to take something from Andopolis on the dock. Abel had something that had something to do with whatever he wanted. He tapped it inside his coat as he talked. Abel got knifed, let out a bellow, and went off the dock into the drink. Andopolis ran after he knifed Abel. You headed him off in the park. He got away and ran some more. You did a sneak to my hooker while the cop looked around.”

“Did you guess all that?” Blick sneered.

They were nearing Biscayne Boulevard and traffic. On the News building tower, the neon sign alternately spelled WIOD and NEWS. Sail took a deep breath and tried to watch Blick’s face.

“I’d like to know what Abel wanted.”

Blick said nothing. They scuffed over the sidewalk, and Blick, walking as if he did not feel as if he weighed much, seemed to think to a conclusion which pleased him.

“Hell, Nola. Maybe Andopolis didn’t spill to our bud, here.”

Nola did not answer. She seemed about asleep. Blick pinched her, slapped her, and that awakened her somewhat.

A police radio car was parked at the corner of Biscayne and Blick did not see it in time. He said, as if he didn’t give a damn, “Stagger, bud! This should be good.”

Sail shoved a little to steer the girl to the side of the walk farthest from the prowl car. Blick shoved back to straighten them up. The result was that they passed close enough to the police machine to reach it with one good jump. Sail shoved Blick and Nola as hard as he could, using the force of the shove to propel himself toward the car. He grabbed the spare tire at the back and used it to help himself around the machine to shelter.

Blick’s revolver went off three times about as rapidly as a revolver could fire. Both cops in the car brayed, and fell out of the car onto Sail.

Blick carried Nola to a taxicab forty feet down the street, and dumped her in. He stood beside the hack, aimed, and air began leaving the left front tire of the police car. The cops started shooting in a rattled way. Blick leaped into the taxi. An instant later, the hack driver fell out of his own machine, holding his head. The taxi took off. The two cops sprang up, and piled into their machine, one yelling:

“What about this one in the street?”

“Hell, he’s dead.”

The cops drove after the taxi, one shooting, his partner having trouble steering with the flat tire.

Sail, for a fat man, ran away from there very fast.

Sail planted his heaving chest against the lunch stand counter, held on to the edge with both hands, and stood there a while, twice looking down at his knees and moving them experimentally, as if suspecting something was wrong with them. The young man, who looked as youths in lunch stands somehow always manage to look, came over and swiped the counter with his towel.

“What’ve you got in cans?” Sail asked him, then stopped the answering recital on the third name. Beer suds overflowed the can before it hit the counter. Sail drank the first can and most of the next in big gulps, but slowed down on the third and seemed tied up in thought. He scraped at the tartar on a tooth with a fingernail, then started chewing the nail and got it down to the quick, then looked at it as if surprised. He absently put three dimes on the counter.

“Forty-five,” the youth corrected.

Sail added a half and said, “Some nickels out of that.”

He carried the nickels over to the mob around the slot machines. He stood around with his hands in his pockets. He tried whistling, and on the second attempt got a good result, after which he looked more satisfied with himself. His mouth warped wryly as he watched the play at the two machines. He took his nickels out, looked at them, firmly put them back, but took them out a bit later. When there was a lull, he shoved up to the slot machines.

The one-armed bandit gave him a lemon and two bars, with another bar just showing.

“You almost made it,” someone said. “A little more and you’d have made the jackpot.”

“Brother,” Sail said, “you must be a mind reader.”

He backed up, waited, still giving some attention to his private thoughts, until he got a chance at the other machine. It showed a bar, a lemon, a bar. Sail rubbed his forearms, looked thoughtful and walked off.

A telephone booth was housed at the end of Pier Four. Sail, when a nickel got a dial tone, dialed the 0, said, “Operator, I believe in giving all telephone operators possible employment, so I never dial a number. Give me police headquarters, please.” He waited for a while after the operator laughed, said, “I want to report an attempted robbery,” then told someone else, “This is Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. A few minutes ago, a man and a woman boarded my boat and marched me away at the point of a gun. I do not know why, except that the man was a drug user. I feel he intended to kill me. There was a police car parked at the corner of Biscayne, and when I broke away and got behind it, the man tried to shoot me, then drove off with the woman in a taxi, and two officers chased them. I want to know what to do now.”

“It would help if you described the pair.”

The man and woman Sail described would hardly be recognized as Blick and Nola.

“Could you come up to headquarters and look over our gallery?” asked the voice.

“Where is it?”

“Turn left off Flagler just as you reach the railroad.”

When Sail left the telephone booth, the youth with the hot-dog-stand look was jerking the handle of one slot machine, then the other, and swearing.

“Funny both damn things blew up!” he complained.

Sail walked off wearing a small secret grin.

Two hours later, Sail pushed back a stack of gallery photographs in police headquarters and said in a tired, wondering voice, “There sure seem to be a lot of crooks in this world. But I don’t see my two.”

The captain at his elbow said heartily, “You don’t, eh? That’s tough. One of the boys in the radio car got it in the leg. We found the taxi. And we’ll find them two. You can bet on that.” He was a big brown captain with the kind of jaw and eyes that went with his job. He had said his name was Rader.

Sail rode back to the City Yacht Basin in a taxi, and looked around before he got out. He walked to Sail. While adjusting a spring line, he saw a head shape through the skylight. By craning, he saw the head shape was finished out by a police cap. Sail walked back and forth, changing the spring lines, which did not need changing, and otherwise putting off what might come. Finally, he pulled down his coat sleeves, put on an innocent look and went down.

One policeman waiting in the cabin was using his tongue to lather a new cigar with saliva. The tongue was coated. He was shaking, not very much, but shaking. His face had some loose red skin on it, and his neck was wattled.

The second policeman was the young bony cop with the warp in the end of his mouth. He still had his flashlight.

The third man was putting bottles and test tubes in a scuffed brown leather bag which held more of the same stuff and a microscope off which some of the enamel was worn. He wore a fuzzy gray flannel suit, had rimless, hookless glasses pinched tight on his nose, and had chewed up about half of the cigar in his mouth without lighting it. The cigar was the same kind the other policeman was licking.

Sail said, “I just talked to Captain Rader.”

The warp got deeper in the end of the young cop’s mouth. He switched his flashlight on and off in Sail’s eyes, then hung it from the hook on his belt.

“What about?”

Sail told them what he had talked to Captain Rader about — the kidnapping, which he said he could not understand. In describing Nola and Blick, whom he did not name — he made no mention of having heard their names — he repeated the words he had used over the telephone.

When it was over, the young cop stepped forward, jaw first.

“All right, by God! Now you can tell us the truth!”

The shaking policeman got up slowly, holding his shiny damp cigar and looking miserable. “Now, Joey, that way won’t do it.”

Joey grabbed Sail’s right wrist and squeezed it. “The hell it won’t! Lewis says there was human blood on the dock along with the fish blood!”

The shaking policeman said, “Now, Joey.”

Joey shouted, “A lot of people heard somebody let out a yip. Even over in the park where I was doing the vice squad’s work, I heard it.”

Sail held out his left hand to show the tear in the brown callus of the palm.

“A fishhook made that,” he said. “You saw it bleed. There’s your human blood on the dock.”

Joey yelled, “Mister sailor, we’ve been checking on you by radio. You cleared from Bimini, the customs tells us. We radioed Bimini. You know what? You were asked to get out of Bimini. A gambling joint went broke in Bimini because one of their wheels had been wired and a lot of lads in the know made a cleaning. It ended up in a brawl and the gambling joint owner went to the hospital.”

Joey shook his finger at Sail’s throat. “The British police asked around and it began to look as if you had tipped the winners how to play. The joint owner claimed he didn’t know his wheel was wired. It ended up with you being asked to clear out. The only reason you’re not in the Bimini jug is because they couldn’t figure any motive. You didn’t get a cut. You hadn’t lost any jack on the wheel. You didn’t have a grudge against the owner. It was a screwy business, the British said, from beginning to end. But that’s what they think. I think different. You know what I think?”

“I doubt if it would be interesting,” Sail said dryly.

“I think you outfoxed ’em. You’re a smooth article. That’s what you think. But you can’t pull this stuff here.”

The shaking policeman said, “You haven’t got a leg, Joey,” between teeth clicks.

“I’ll sweat the so-and-so until I got a thousand legs!”

The freezing policeman groaned, “You should have your behind kicked, Joey.”

Joey released Sail’s right wrist to frown at the other officer. “Listen, Mister Homicide—”

The shaking policeman got between Joey and Sail and stood there, saying nothing. Joey frowned at him, then sucked at his lower lip, pulling it out of shape.

“Hell, if you gotta run this, run it!” he said.

He turned and stamped up the companion, across the deck and, judging from the sounds, had some kind of an accident and nearly fell overboard getting from the boat to the dock, but finally made it safely.

The other policeman, grinning without much meaning in it, extended a hand which, when Sail took it, was hot and unnatural. After he held the hand a moment, Sail could feel it trembling.

“I’m Captain Chris of homicide,” the officer said. “I want to thank you for reporting your trouble to Captain Rader, and I want to congratulate you on your narrow escape from those two. But next time, don’t take such chances. Never fool with hop and guns. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything of your attacker and his girlfriend or sister, whichever she was. I hope you have a good time in Miami in the meantime. We have a wonderful city. Florida has a wonderful climate.” He shook with his chill.

The rabbity man, Lewis, who had not said anything, finished putting things in his bag, picked up a camera with a photoflash attachment which had been unnoticed on a bunk, and went up the companion, stepping carefully, as one who was not used to boats. He got onto the dock carefully with bag and camera. Captain Chris followed.

Sail said, “Quinine and whiskey is supposed to be good for malaria. But only certain quinines.”

“Thanks,” said Captain Chris. “But I think whiskey gave it to me.”

They walked away, and young Joey was the only one who looked back.

The tide stood at flood slack, the water still, so that things did not float away. Something bright was bobbing on the water, and Sail got a light. He found five of the bright things when he hunted. Used photographic flashlight bulbs, with brass bases not corroded enough by the salt water for them to have been in long. Sail went below and looked around. Enough things were out of place to show the hooker had been searched. Fingerprint powder had not been wiped off quite well enough.

Sail catnapped all night, sleeping no more than a half hour soundly at any one time. He spent long periods with a mirror which he rigged to look out of the companion without showing himself.

On a big Matthews cruiser tied across the slip, somebody was ostensibly standing anchor watch. Boats lying at a slip do not usually stand on anchor. The watcher did not smoke and did not otherwise allow any light to get to his features. It was dark enough that he might have been tall or short, wide or narrow. The small things he did were what any man would do during a long, tiresome job, with one exception.

He frequently put a finger deep in his mouth and felt around.

Party fish boats making noise on their way out of Pier Five furnished Sail with an excuse to go on deck at about six bells. He stood there yawning, rubbing his head with his palms and making faces. He rubbed a finger across his chest and rolled up little twists and balls of dirt or old skin, after which he took a shower with the dock hose.

The watcher was not around the Matthews in the morning sun. Sail went below to don a pair of black shorts which washing had faded.

Sail’s dinky rode in stern davits, bugeye fashion, at enough of a tilt not to hold seas or spray, and Sail lowered it. He got a brush and the dock hose and washed down the topsides, taking off dried salt that seawater had deposited on the hull. He dropped his brush in the water three different times; it sank, and he had to reach under for it.

The third time he reached under for the brush, he retrieved the stuff which the Greek’s clothing had yielded the night before. The articles had not worked out of the nook between the dock cross braces underwater where Sail had jammed them after swimming back from the island where he had taken the dead Greek.

Sail finished washing down, hauled the dink up on the davits, and during the business of coiling the dock hose around the faucet in the middle of the dock, he worked his eyes. Any one of a dozen staring persons within view might have been the watcher from the Matthews. The other eleven would be tourists down for a gawk at the yachts.

Sail took the Greek’s stuff out of the dink when he got the scrub brush. He went below. Picking the business cards apart was a job because they were soaked to pulp. He examined both sides of each card as he got it separated. One card said Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis of the yacht Athens Girl chartered for Gulf Stream fishing and that nobody caught more fish. The address was Pier Five. I live aboard, was written in pencil on the back.

The other twenty-six cards said the Lignum Vitae Towing Company had a president named Captain Abel Dokomos. The address was on the Miami River, and there was a telephone number for after six.

The piece of board was four by twenty by a quarter inches, mahogany, with screw holes in the four corners. Most of the varnish was gone, peeled rather than worn off, and so was some of the gold leaf. There were a letter and four figures in gold leaf: K9420.

Sail burned all of the stuff in the galley Shipmate.

A man was taking two slot machines away from the lunch stand as Sail passed on his way uptown. Later, he passed four places which had slot machines, and there was a play around all of them. Sail loafed around each crowd, but not as if he wanted to. He walked off from one crowd, then came back. In all, he managed to play three machines. The third paid four nickels and he played two back without getting anything. The slot in a dial telephone got one of the surviving nickels.

He told the operator he didn’t dial as a matter of principle and asked for Pier Five, and when he got Pier Five, asked for Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis of the Athens Girl. It took them five minutes to decide they couldn’t find Captain Andopolis.

After the telephone clanked its metal throat around the fourth nickel, Sail repeated the refusal to dial and asked for the number of Captain Abel Dokomos’ Lignum Vitae Towing Company.

When he heard the answer, he made his voice as different as he could. “Cap’n Abel handy?”

“He hasn’t come down this morning. Anything we can do?”

“Call later,” Sail said.

The woman on the other end of the wire had been Blick’s sister Nola, visitor aboard Sail the night before.

Sail selected a cafeteria which was a little overdone in chromium. The darkie who carried his tray got a dime. There was a small dab of oatmeal on the first chair Sail started to sit on. He broke his egg yolks and watched them run with an intent air. The fifth lump made his coffee cup overflow. He put almost a whole egg down with the first gulp from the force of habit of a man who eats his own cooking and eats it in solitude.

A boy wandered among the tables, selling newspapers and racing tip sheets. He carried and sold more tip sheets than newspapers. Sail took the coffee slowly with the spoon, getting a little undissolved sugar out of the bottom of the cup with each spoonful, seeming to enjoy it. The sugar lumps were wrapped in paper carrying the cafeteria’s advertisement, and he unwrapped one and ate it after he finished everything before him. He put the papers in the coffee cup.

The man in a stiff straw hat eating near the door did not put syrup or anything sweet on his pancakes or in his coffee. And when he finished eating, he poked the back of his cheek absently with a finger, then put the finger in the back of his mouth to feel.

Sail got up and took a slow walk until he came to a U-Drive-It. There was a slot machine in the U-Drive-It. He tried it, and it paid off only in noise. He made a deposit and got a light six sedan. For three blocks, he drove slowly, looking out and appraising buildings for height. He picked one much taller than the others and parked in front of it. After starting into the building, he came back to look over an upright dingus, one of a row of the things along the curb. Small print said motorists could park there half an hour if they put a nickel in the dingus and turned the handle.

“The whole town’s got it,” he complained, and shook the device to see if it would start working without a nickel. It wouldn’t and he put one in.

He said loudly, just before entering one of the tall building elevators, “Five!”

The fifth-floor corridor was not much different from other office building corridors. There were three real estate and one law office and some more.

The man who had felt his bad tooth in the cafeteria came sneaking up the stairs from the fourth floor and put his head around the corner. Sail was set. The man’s straw hat sounded surprisingly like glass when it collapsed, and the man got down on all fours to mew in pain. Sail hit again, then unwrapped his belt from his fist. He blew on the fist, working the fingers.

“I’ve got to rush my friend to a place for treatment,” he told the operator when the elevator cage came.

He thanked the operator and half a dozen other volunteer assistants while he started the rented car. He drove past the U-Drive-It. The proprietor was fussing with his machine.

Sail drove five or six miles by guess before he found a lonesome spot and got out. He hauled the man out. Sail’s breathing was regular and deeper than usual; his eyes were wide with excitement, and he perspired. He wiped his palms on his clerical black shorts and bent over his victim.

The man with the bad tooth began big at the top and tapered. His small hands were callused, dirt was ground into the calluses, and the nails were broken. He had dark hair and a dark face, but got lighter as he went down, finishing off with feet in a pair of white shoes. He smelled a little as men smell who live on small boats with no baths.

His pockets held three hundred in nothing smaller than tens, all new bills, in a plain envelope. There was a dollar sixty-one in silver mixed up with the cashier’s slip for his cafeteria breakfast. In ten or so minutes, he was scowling at Sail.

He said something in Greek. It sounded like his personal opinion of Sail or the situation.

Sail said, “Andopolis?”

“You know my name, so whatcha askin’ for?” the man growled without much accent.

“You’re here because I been getting too much attention,” Sail said. “That oughta be clear, hadn’t it?”

Andopolis felt his head, that part of his cheek over his bad tooth, then got to his feet. Sail took his belt out of his pocket and started threading it through the loops. Andopolis clutched his head, groaned, started to sit down, but jumped at Sail instead. Sail moved to one side, but not enough, and Andopolis hit his shoulder and the impact turned him around and around. Andopolis hit him somewhere else, and the whole front of his body went numb and something against his back was the ground.

“I’ll stomp ya!” Andopolis yelled.

He jumped on Sail with both feet, and Sail was still numb enough to feel only the dull shock. His rounded body rolled under the impact, and Andopolis waved his arms to keep erect. Sail had his belt unthreaded. He laid it like a whip across Andopolis’ face. Andopolis grabbed his face, and was wide open when he sat down heavily beside Sail.

When Andopolis came to, his wrists were fastened with the belt. Sail had his shirt unbuttoned and was examining the damage the other’s feet had done. There was one purple print of the entire bottom of Andopolis’ right foot, and a skinned patch where the other had slid off, with loosened skin tangled in the long golden hairs, but not much blood. He put back his head and shoulders and started to take a full breath, but broke it off in coughing. He sat down coughing, holding his chest, and sweated.

“Yah!” Andopolis gloated. “I stomp your guts good if you don’t lay off me! What you been follerin’ me for?”

Sail looked up sickly. “Followin’ you?”

“Yah.”

Sail, still sitting, said, “My Christian friend, you stood anchor watch on me last night. You haunted me this morning. But still I was following you, was I?”

“Before that, I’m talk about,” Andopolis growled. “You follow me to Bimini in that black bugeye. I make the run from Bimini here yesterday. You make it too. What kinda blind fool you take me for? You followin’ me, and don’t you think I don’t know him.”

“It must have been coincidence.”

“Don’t feed me, mister.”

“It just might be that nobody will have to feed you for long.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“You were walking down the dock toward my boat last night when Abel jumped you. You sort of ruined Abel, and I covered up for you, but that’s not the point. The point is, why were you coming to see me?”

“Aw, hell, I was gonna tell you about followin’ me.”

Sail coughed some, deep and low, trying to keep it from moving his ribs, then got up on his feet carefully.

“All right, now we’re being honest with each other, and I’ll tell you a true story about a yacht named Lady Luck.”

Andopolis crowded his lips into a bunch and pushed the bunch out as far as he could, but didn’t say anything.

Sail said, “The Lady Luck, Department of Commerce registration number K9420. She belonged to Bill Lord of Tulsa. Oil. Out in Tulsa, they call Bill the Osage Magician on account of what he’s got that it seems to take to find oil. Missus Bill likes jewelry, and Bill likes her, so he buys her plenty. Because Missus Bill really likes her rocks, she carries them around with her. You following me?”

Andopolis was. He still had his lips pooched.

“Bill Lord had his Lady Luck anchored off the vet camp on Lower Matecumbe last November,” Sail continued. “Bill and the missus were ashore, looking over the camp. Bill was in the trenches himself, and is some kind of a shot with the American Legion and the Democrats, so he was interested. The missus left her pretties on the yacht. Remember that. Everybody has read about the hurricane that hit that afternoon, and maybe some noticed that Bill and his missus were among those who hung on behind that tank car. But the Lady Luck wasn’t so lucky, and she dragged her pick off somewhere and sank. For a while, nobody knew where.”

Sail stopped to cough. He had to lie down on his back before he could stop, and he was very careful getting erect. Perspiration had most of him wet.

“A couple of weeks ago, a guy asked the Department of Commerce lads to check and give him the name of the boat, and the owner, that carried number K9420,” Sail said, keeping his voice down now. “The word got to me. Never mind how. And it was easy to find you had had a fishing party down around the Matecumbes and Long Key a few days before you got curious about K9420. It was a little harder to locate your party. Two guys. They said you anchored off Lower Matecumbe to bottom-fish, and your anchor fouled something, and you had a time, and finally, when you got the anchor up, you brought aboard some bow planking off a sunken boat. From the strain, it was pretty evident the anchor had pulled this planking off the rest of the boat, which was still down there. You checked up as a matter of course to learn what boat you had found.”

Andopolis looked as if more than his tooth hurt him.

Sail kept his voice even lower to keep his ribs from moving.

“Tough you didn’t get in touch with the insurance people instead of contacting Captain Abel Dokomos, a countryman who had a towing and salvage outfit and no rep to speak of. You needed help to get the Lady Luck. Cap Abel tried to make you cough up the exact location. You got scared and lit out for Bimini. You discovered I was following you, and that scared you back to Miami. You wanted a showdown, and when Cap Abel collared you on the dock as you were coming to see me, you took care of that part of your troubles with a knife. But that left Abel’s lady friend, or whatever she is, and her brother, Blick. They were in the know, too. They tried to grab you last night in the park after you fixed Abel up, and you outran them. Now, that’s a very complete story, or do you think?”

Andopolis was a man who did his thinking with the help of his face, and there was more disgust than anything else on his features.

“You tryin’ to cut in?” he snarled.

“Not trying.”

“Then what—”

“Have.”

The sun was comfortable, but mosquitoes were coming out of the swamp around the road to investigate.

“Yeah,” Andopolis said. “I guess you have, maybe.”

Sail put his shirt on, favoring his chest. “We’ve got to watch the insurance outfit. They paid off on Missus Bill’s stuff. Over a hundred thousand. They’ll have wires out.”

Andopolis got up and held out his hands for the belt to be taken off, and Sail took it off. Andopolis said, “I thought of the insurance when I got Cap Abel. We used to run rum. The Macedonian tramp!”

“There’s shoal-water diving stuff aboard my bugeye,” Sail said.

“You don’t get me in no water! Shark, barracuda, moray, sting rays. Hell of a place. If I hadn’t been afraid, I’d have done the diving myself. I thought of that, believe me.”

“That’s my worry. It’s not too bad, once you get a system.” Sail felt his chest. “I guess maybe these ribs will knit in a while.”

Andopolis looked much better, almost as if he had forgotten his tooth. “It’s your neck. Okay if you say so.”

“Then let’s get going.”

Andopolis was feeling his tooth when he got into the car. Sail had driven no more than half a mile when both front tires let go their air. The car was in the canal beside the road before anything could be done about it.

The car broke its windows going down the canal bank. The canal must have been six feet deep, and its tea-colored water filled the machine at once. Sail had both arms over his middle where the steering wheel had hit. So much air had been knocked out of him, and his middle hurt so, that he had to take something into his lungs, and there was only water. He began to drown.

The water seemed to be rushing around inside the car, although there was room for no more to come in. Sail couldn’t find the door handles. The broken windows he did find were too small to crawl out of, but after exploring three, he got desperate and tried a small one. There was not enough hole. He pushed and worked around with the jagged glass, his head out of the car, the rest of him inside, until strange feelings of something running out of his neck made him know he was cutting his throat.

He pulled his head in, and pummeled the car roof with blows that did not have strength enough to knock him away from what he was hitting. It came to his mind to try the jagged glass again as being better than drowning, but he couldn’t find it, and clawed and felt with growing madness until he began to get fistfuls of air. He sank twice before he clutched a weed on shore, after which the spasms he was having kept him at first from hearing the shots.

Yells were mixed in with the shot sounds. Andopolis was on the canal bank, running madly. Blick and his sister were on the same bank, running after Andopolis, shooting at him, and having, for such short range, bad luck. They were shooting at Andopolis’ legs. All three ran out of sight. Sound alone told Sail when they winged Andopolis and grabbed him.

Sail had some of the water out of his lungs. He swam to a clump of brush which hung down into the water, got under it, and managed to get his coughing stopped by the time Blick and Nola came up hauling Andopolis. Andopolis sobbed at the top of his voice.

“Shoot his other leg off if he acts up, Nola,” Blick yelled. “I’ll get our little fat bud.”

Sail wanted to cough until it was almost worth getting shot just to do so. Red from his neck was spreading through the water under the brush.

“He must be a submarine,” Blick said. He got a stick and poked around. “Hell, Nola, this water is eight feet deep anyhow.”

Andopolis babbled something in Greek.

Blick screamed, “Shut up, or we’ll put bullets into you like we put ’em into your car tires!”

Andopolis went on babbling.

“His leg is pretty bad, Blick,” Nola said.

“Hell, let ’im bleed.”

Air kept coming up from the submerged car. Sail tried to keep his mind off wanting to cough. It seemed that Blick was going to stand for hours on the bank with his bright little pistol.

“He musta drowned,” Blick said. “Get that other leg to workin’, Andopolis. You didn’t know we been on your trail all night and all mornin’, did ya? We didn’t lose it when this Sail got you, either.”

Andopolis whimpered as they hazed him away. Car sound departed.

Captain Chris, wide-eyed and hearty and with no sign of a chill, exclaimed, “Well, well, we began to think something had happened to you.”

Sail looked at him with eyes that appeared drained, then stumbled the other two steps down the companion into the main cabin of Sail and let himself down on the starboard seat. Pads of cotton under gauze made Sail’s neck and wrists three times normal thickness. Tape stuck to his face in four places, and iodine had run out from under one of the pieces and dried.

Young bony Joey looked Sail over and his big grin took the warp out of the corner of his mouth.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said cheerfully. “Somebody beat me to it.”

Sail gave them a look of bile. “This is a private boat, in case you forgot.”

“He’s mussed up and now he’s tough!” Joey said. “Swell!”

“Now, now, let’s keep things on an amiable footing,” Captain Chris murmured.

Sail said, “Drag it!”

Joey popped his palms together, aimed a finger at Sail. “You got told about Lewis finding human blood in that fish mess on the dock last night. But try to alibi the rest. There was wet tracks in this boat. That was all right, maybe, only some of the tracks were salt water and the water spilled on the galley floor was fresh. We got the harbor squad diver down this morning. He found a box on the bottom below this boat with live fish in it. He found a bathing suit with a sinker tied to it. And this morning, a yachtsman beached his dink on the little island by Pier One and found a dead Greek. We sat down with all that and done our arithmetic, and here we are.”

Sail’s face began changing from red and tan to cream and tan, although the bandages took away some of the effect.

Captain Chris said, “Joey, you’d make a lousy gambler, on account of you show your cards.”

Sail said in a low voice, “You’re gonna get your snouts busted if you keep this up!”

Captain Chris looked unconvincingly injured. “I didn’t think we’d have any trouble with you, Mister Sail. I hoped we wouldn’t. You acted like a gentleman last night.”

Sail had been seated. He got up, bending over first to get the center of gravity right. He pointed a thumb at the companion. “Don’t fall overboard on your way out.”

“I bet he thinks we’re leaving!” Joey jeered.

A string of red crawled out from under one of the bandages on Sail’s neck. His face was more cream than any other color. He reached behind himself into the tackle locker and got a gaff hook, a four-foot haft of varnished oak with a bright tempered-steel hook with a needle point. He showed Joey the hook and his front teeth.

He said violently, “I’ve got a six-aspirin headache and things to go with it! I feel too lousy to shy at cops. You two public servants get the hell out before I go fishing for kidneys.”

Joey yelled happily, “Damn me, he’s resisting arrest and threatening an officer!”

Sail said, “Arrest?”

“I forgot to tell you.” Joey grinned. “We’re going to—”

Sail asked Captain Chris, “Is this on the level?”

“I regret that it is,” Captain Chris said. “After all, evidence is evidence, and while Miami is noted for her hospitality, we do draw lines, and when our visitors go so far as to use knives on—”

“I’m gonna hate to break your heart, you windbag!” Sail said angrily.

He took short steps, and not very fast ones, into the galley, and took the rearmost can of beer out of the icebox. He cut off the top instead of using the patent opener. When the beer had filled the sink with suds, he got a glass tube which had been waxed inside the can. He held out the two sheets of paper which the tube contained.

Joey raked his eyes over the print and penned signatures, then spelled them out, lips moving.

“This don’t make a damn bit of difference!”

Captain Chris complained, “My glasses fell off yesterday during one of them infernal chills. What does it say, Joey?”

“He’s a private dick assigned to locate some stuff that sank on a yacht. The insurance people hired him.”

Captain Chris buttoned his coat, pulled it down over his hips, set his cap by patting the top of it.

“I’m afraid this makes it different, Joey.”

Joey snorted. “I say it don’t.”

Captain Chris walked to the companion. “Beauty before age, Joey.”

“Listen, if you think—”

“Out, Joey.”

“Mister Homicide, any day—”

“Out!” Captain Chris roared. “You’re as big a goddamn fool as your mother.”

Joey licked his lips while he kept a malevolent eye on Sail, then took a step forward, but changed his mind and climbed the companion steps. When he was outside, he complained, “Paw, you and your ideas give me an ache.”

Captain Chris sighed wearily while he looked at Sail. “He’s my son, the spoiled whelp.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t want to cooperate?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“If you get yourself in a sling, it’d be better if you had a reason for refusing to help the police.”

Sail said, “All I get out of this is a commission for recovering the stuff. Right now, I need that money like hell.”

“You’d still get it if we helped each other.”

“Maybe. But I’ve cooperated before.”

Captain Chris shrugged, climbed three of the companion’s five steps, and stopped. “This malaria is sure something. I could sing like a lark today, only I keep thinking about the chills due tomorrow. Did you say a special quinine went in that whiskey?”

“Bullards. It’s English.”

“Thanks.” Captain Chris climbed the rest of the way out.

When the two policemen reached the dock, Sail came slowly on deck and handed Captain Chris a bottle. “You can’t buy Bullards here.”

“Say, I appreciate this!”

“If my day’s run of luck keeps on the way it has, you’ll probably find your knife man in a canal somewhere,” Sail said slowly.

“I’ll look,” Captain Chris promised.

The two cops went away with Joey kicking his feet down hard on the dock boards.

There was a rip in the nervous old man’s canvas apron, and he mixed his words with waves of a pipe off which most of the stem had been bitten. He waved the pipe and said, “My, mister, you must’ve had a car accident.”

Sail, holding to the counter, said, “What about the charts?”

“Yeah, there’s one other place sells the government charts besides us. Hopkins Carter. But if you’re going down in the keys, we got everything you need here. If you go on the inside, you’ll want thirty-two-sixty and sixty-one. They’re the strip charts. But if you take Hawk Channel, you’ll need harbor chart five-eighty-three, and charts twelve-forty-nine, fifty and fifty-one. Here, I’ll show—”

Sail squinted his eyes, swallowed and said, “I don’t want to buy a chart. I want you to slip out and telephone me if either of certain two persons comes in here and asks for chart twelve-fifty, the one which has Lower Matecumbe.”

“Huh?”

Sail said patiently, “It’s simple. You just tell the party you got to get the chart, and go telephone me, then stall around three or four minutes before you deliver the chart, giving me time to get over here and pick up their trail.”

The nervous old man put his pipe in his mouth and immediately took it out.

“What kind of shenanigans is this?”

Sail showed him a license to operate in Florida.

“One of them private detectives, huh?” the old man said, impressed.

Sail put a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

“That one’s got twins. How about it?”

“Mister, if you’ll just describe your parties. That’s all!”

Sail made a word picture of Blick and Nola, putting the salient points down on a piece of paper. He added a telephone number.

“The phone’s a booth in a cigar store on the corner. I’ll be there. How far is this Hopkins Carter?”

“Two blocks.”

“I’ll probably be there for the next ten minutes.”

Sail, walking off, was not as pale as he had been on the boat. He had put on a serge suit more black than blue and a new black polo. When he was standing in front of the elevator, taking a pull at a flat amber bottle which had a crown and a figure 5 on the label, the old man yelled.

“Hey, mister!”

Sail lowered the bottle, started coughing, and called between coughs, “Now” — cough — “what?”

“Lemme look at this again and see if you said anything about the way he talked.”

Sail moved back to where he could see the old man peering at the paper which held the descriptions. The old man took his pipe out of his teeth.

“Mister, what does that feller talk like?”

“Well, about like the rest of these crackers. No, wait. He’ll call you bud two or three times.”

The old man pointed his pipe at the floor. “I already sold that man a twelve-fifty. ’Bout half hour ago.”

Sail pumped air out of his lungs in a short laugh which had no sound except the sound made by the air passing his teeth and nostrils. He said, “That’s swell. They would probably want a late chart for their X-marks-the-spot. And so they’ve got it, and they’re off to the wars, and me, I’m out ten percent on better than a hundred thousand.”

He had taken two slow steps toward the elevator when the old man said, “The chart was delivered.”

Sail came around. “Eh?”

“He ordered it over the telephone. We delivered. I got the address somewhere.” He thumbed an order book. “Whileaway. A houseboat on the river below the Twelfth Street causeway.”

Sail put a ten on the counter. “The brother.”

He was a fat man trying to hide a big face behind two hands, a match and a cigar. He said, “Oof!” and his dropping hands dragged cigar ashes down his vest when Sail prodded him in the upper belly with a fingertip.

Sail said, “I just didn’t want you to think you were getting away with it.”

The fat man turned his cigar down at an injured angle. “With what?”

“Whatever you call what you’ve been doing.”

“There must be some mistake, brother.”

“There’s been several. It’ll be another if you keep on trying to tail me.”

“Me, tailing you! Why should I do that?”

“Because you’re a cop. You’ve got it all over you. And probably because Captain Chris ordered me trailed.”

The plainclothesman sent his cigar between two pedestrians, across the sidewalk and into the gutter. “Mind telling me what you can do about it?”

Sail had started away. He came back, pounding his heels. “What was that?”

“I’ve heard all about you, small-fat-and-tough. You’re due to learn that with the Miami Police Department, you can’t horse—”

Sail put his hand on the fat man’s face. The fingers were spread, and against the hand’s two longest fingers, the fat man’s eyeballs felt wet. Sail shoved out and up a little. The cop did not yell or curse. He swung a vicious uppercut. He kicked with his right foot, then his left. The kicks would have lifted a hound dog over a roof. He held his eyes. The third kick upset a stack of gallon cans of paint.

Sail got out of there. He changed cabs four times as rapidly as one cab could find another.

Whileaway was built for rivers, and not very wide rivers. She was a hooker that couldn’t take a sea. A houseboat about sixty feet waterline, she had three decks that put her up like a skyscraper. She should never have been built. She was white, or had been.

Scattered onshore near the houseboat was a gravel pile, two trucks with nobody near them, a shed, junk left by the hurricane, a trailer with both tires flat, windows broken, and two rowboats in as bad shape as the trailer. Sail was behind most of them at one time or another on his way to the riverbank. There was a concrete seawall. Between Sail and the houseboat, two gigs, a yawl, a cruiser and another houseboat were tied to dolphins along the concrete river bulkhead. Nobody seemed to be on any of the boats.

Sail wore dark blue silk underwear shorts. He hid everything else under the hurricane junk. The water had a little more smell and floating things than in the harbor. He kept behind the moored boats after he got over the seawall, and let the tide carry him. He was just coming under the Whileaway bow when one of the square window ports opened almost overhead.

Sail sank. He thought somebody was going to shoot or use a harpoon.

Something large and heavy fell into the water and sank, colliding with him, pushing him out of the way and going on sinking. He had enough contact with it to tell the first part of it was a navy-type anchor. He swam down after it. The river had two fathoms here, and he found the anchor and what was tied to it. The tide stretched his legs out behind as he clung to what he had found.

Whoever had tied the knots was a sailor, and sailor knots, while they hold, are made to be easily untied. Sail got them loose.

It would have been better to swim under the houseboat and come up on the other side, away from the port from which the anchor and Nola had been thrown, but Sail didn’t feel equal to anything but straight up. His air capacity was low because of his near drowning earlier in the day.

He put his head out of the water with his eyes open and fixed in the direction of the square port. No head was sticking out of the port. No weapon appeared. The tide had taken Sail near the stern of the Whileaway and still carried him.

He got Nola’s head out. Water leaked from her nose and mouth. Sail got an arm up as high as he could, clutching. He missed the first sagging spring line, got the second. The rope with which the anchor had been attached to Nola still clung to her ankles. He tied one of her arms to the spring line so that her head was out.

Sail went up the spring line with his hands until one foot would reach the windowsills. From there to the first deck was simpler.

Nola began to gag and cough. It made a racket.

Sail opened his mouth to yell at her to be quiet. She couldn’t hear him yet, or understand. He wheeled and sloped into the houseboat cabin.

The furnishings might have been something once, but that had been fifteen years ago. Varnish everywhere had alligatored.

Sail angled into the galley when he saw it. He came out with a quart brass fire extinguisher which needed polishing, and a rusted ice pick. There had been nothing else in sight.

Nola got enough water out to start screeching.

Beyond the galley was a dining room. Sail had half crossed it when Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis came in the opposite door with a rusty butcher knife.

Andopolis was using a chair for a crutch, riding its bottom with the knee of the leg which Blick and Nola had put a bullet through. Around his eyes — on the lids more than elsewhere — were puffy gray blisters about a size which burning cigarettes would make. Three fingernails were off each hand. Red ran from the three mutilated tips on the right hand down over the rusty butcher knife.

Sail had time to throw the fire extinguisher and made use of the time, but the best he did was bounce the extinguisher off the bulkhead behind Andopolis.

Andopolis said thickly, “I feex you up, mine fran!” and deliberately reversed the butcher knife for throwing.

Sail threw his ice pick. It stuck into Andopolis’ chest over his heart. It did not go in deep enough to bother Andopolis. He did not even bother to jerk it out.

Sail jumped for the door, wanting to go back the way he had come. His wet feet slipped, let him down flat on his face.

Feet came pounding through the door and went overhead. Sail looked up. The feet belonged to the plainclothes detective who had been in the hardware store which sold marine charts.

Andopolis threw his knife. He was good at it, or lucky. The detective put his hands over his middle and looked foolish. He changed his course and ran to the wall. His last steps were spraddling. He leaned against the bulkhead. His hands did not quite cover the handle of the butcher knife.

Andopolis hobbled to Sail on his chair. He stood on one leg and clubbed the chair. Sail rolled. The chair became two pieces and some splinters on the floor. Sail, still lying on the floor, kicked Andopolis’ good leg. Andopolis fell down.

As if that had given him an idea, the detective fell. He kept both hands over the knife handle.

Andopolis used the two largest parts of the chair and flailed at Sail. On all fours, Sail got away. His throat wound was running again. He got up, but there was no weapon except the bent fire extinguisher. He got that. Andopolis hit him with the chair leg and his left side went numb from the belt down. He retreated, as lopsided on his feet as Andopolis, and passed into the main cabin.

Nola was still screaming. A man was swearing at her with young cocky Joey’s voice. Men were jumping around on the decks and in the houseboat rooms.

Blick sat on the main cabin floor, getting his head untangled from the remains of a chair. His face was a mess. It was also smeared with blue ink. The ink bottle was upside down under a table on which a new chart was spread open. A common pen lay on the chart.

Andopolis came in following Sail. Andopolis crawled on one knee and two hands.

Blick squawked, “What’s Nola yellin’ for?”

Andopolis crawled as if he did not see Sail or Blick, had not heard Blick. A tattered divan stood against the starboard bulkhead. Andopolis lay down and put an arm under that. He brought out a little bright pistol, either Blick’s or his sister’s.

Captain Chris jumped in through the door.

Andopolis’ small pistol made the noise of a big one. Blick, sitting on the floor, jumped a foot when there seemed no possible way of his jumping, no muscles to propel him upward. He came down with his head forward between his knees, and remained that way, even after drops began coming out of the center of his forehead.

Captain Chris had trouble with his coattails and his gun. Andopolis’ little gun made its noise again. Captain Chris turned around faster than he could have without some help from lead, and ran out, still having trouble with his gun.

Sail worked the handle of the fire extinguisher. The plunger made ink-sick! noises going up and down. No tetrachloride came out. There was nothing to show it ever would. Then the first squirt ran out about a foot. The second was longer, and the third wet Andopolis’ chest. Sail raised the stream and pumped. He got Andopolis’s eyes full and rolled.

Andopolis fired once at where Sail had been. Then he got up on one foot and hopped for the door. His directions were a little confused. He hopped against a bulkhead.

Andopolis went down on the floor and began having a fit. It was a brief fit, ending by Andopolis turning over on his back and relaxing.

The wall had driven the ice pick the rest of the way into his chest.

Outside, Nola still screamed, but now she made words, scatteredly.

“Andopolis... killing Blick... tried... me... Andopolis... last night... Abel... knife... we... him... tell... broke loose... me... anchor... Blick...”

Sail ran to the table. The chart on the table had two ink lines forming a V with arms that ran to landmarks on Lower Matecumbe, and compass bearings were inked beside each arm, with the point where the lines came together ringed.

Sail left with the chart by the door opposite the one which he had come in by, taking the chart. He found a cabin. He tore the V out of the chart, folded it flat and tucked it under his neck bandages, using the stateroom mirror to adjust the bandages to hide the paper. He threw the rest of the chart out of a port on the river side.

Captain Chris was standing near dead Andopolis. Torn coat lining was hanging from under the right tail of his coat, but he had his gun in his hand.

“Where’d you go to?” he wanted to know.

“Was I supposed to stick around while you drew that gun?”

“The fireworks over?”

“I hope so.”

Captain Chris put his gun in his pants pocket. “You’re pinched. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Young Joey came in, not as cocky and not stamping his feet. Two plainclothesmen followed him, then two uniformed officers walking ahead of and behind the old man who sold the charts in the hardware store.

The old man pointed at Sail and said, “He’s the one who asked about the feller who ordered the chart. Like I told you, I gave him—”

“Save it.” Joey glared at Captain Chris. “We still ain’t got nothing on this fat sailor, Paw. The girl says Andopolis is a party fisherman whose anchor pulled up part of a boat.”

The girl had told about everything. Joey kept telling the story until he got to, “So Sail yanked the dame out, and now what’ve we got to hold him on?”

Captain Chris, looking mysterious and satisfied, told Sail, “Get your clothes on or we’ll book you for indecent exposure along with the rest.”

“What rest?”

“Get your clothes on.”

Sail dressed sitting on the hurricane wreckage, brushed off the bottoms of his feet and put on socks and shoes. He looked up at Captain Chris as he tied the shoestrings.

“Kidding, aren’t you?”

“Sure, sure!”

Sail bristled. “You’ve got to have a charge. Just try running me in on an INV and see what it gets you.”

“I’ve got a charge.”

“In a gnat’s eye.”

Captain Chris said with relish, “You’ve been playing the slot machines which are so popular in our fair city. You used a slug made of two hollow halves that fit together and hold muriatic or something that eats the works of the machines and puts them on the fritz. We found a box of the slugs on your boat. We have witnesses who saw you play machines before they went bad.”

Sail wore a dark look toward the squad car. “This is a piker trick.”

Captain Chris tooled the car over a bad street. “You put that gambling joint in Bimini on the bum, too. What’s the idea?”

“Nuts.”

“Now, don’t get that way. I’m jugging you, yes. But it’s the principle. It’s to show you that it ain’t a nice idea to football the cops around. Not in Miami, anyway. You’ll get ten days or ten bucks is all. It’s the principle. That, and a bet I made with Joey that if he’d let me handle this and keep his mouth shut, and you beat me to the kill, I’d jug you on this slot machine thing. Joey wanted you jugged. Now, what’s this between you and slot machines and wheels?”

Sail considered for a while, then took in breath.

“I even went to an institution where they cure things, once,” he said. “Kind of a bughouse.”

“Huh?”

“One psychologist called it a fixation. I’ve always had it. Can’t help it. Some people can’t stand being alone, and some can’t stand being shut up in a room, and some can’t take mice. With me, it’s gambling. Can’t stand it. I can’t stand the thought of taking chances to make money.”

“Just a lad who gets his dough the safe and sane method.”

“That’s the idea,” Sail agreed, “in a general way.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Excerpt) by Zora Neale Hurston

Belle Glade

(Originally published in 1937)

Tea Cake had two bad attacks that night. Janie saw a changing look come in his face. Tea Cake was gone. Something else was looking out of his face. She made up her mind to be off after the doctor with the first glow of day. So she was up and dressed when Tea Cake awoke from the fitful sleep that had come to him just before day. He almost snarled when he saw her dressed to go.

“Where are you goin’, Janie?”

“After de doctor, Tea Cake. You’se too sick tuh be heah in dis house ’thout de doctah. Maybe we oughta git yuh tuh de hospital.”

“Ah ain’t goin’ tuh no hospital no where. Put dat in yo’ pipe and smoke it. Guess you tired uh waitin’ on me and doing fuh me. Dat ain’t de way Ah been wid you. Ah never is been able tuh do enough fuh yuh.”

“Tea Cake, you’se sick. You’se takin’ everything in de way Ah don’t mean it. Ah couldn’t never be tired uh waitin’ on you. Ah’m just skeered you’se too sick fuh me tuh handle. Ah wants yuh tuh git well, honey. Dat’s all.”

He gave her a look full of blank ferocity and gurgled in his throat. She saw him sitting up in bed and moving about so that he could watch her every move. And she was beginning to feel fear of this strange thing in Tea Cake’s body. So when he went out to the outhouse she rushed to see if the pistol was loaded. It was a six-shooter and three of the chambers were full. She started to unload it but she feared he might break it and find out she knew. That might urge his disordered mind to action. If that medicine would only come! She whirled the cylinder so that if he even did draw the gun on her it would snap three times before it would fire. She would at least have warning. She could either run or try to take it away before it was too late. Anyway Tea Cake wouldn’t hurt her. He was jealous and wanted to scare her. She’d just be in the kitchen as usual and never let on. They’d laugh over it when he got well. She found the box of cartridges, however, and emptied it. Just as well to take the rifle from back of the head of the bed. She broke it and put the shell in her apron pocket and put it in a corner in the kitchen almost behind the stove where it was hard to see. She could outrun his knife if it came to that. Of course she was too fussy, but it did no harm to play safe. She ought not to let poor sick Tea Cake do something that would run him crazy when he found out what he had done.

She saw him coming from the outhouse with a queer loping gait, swinging his head from side to side and his jaws clenched in a funny way. This was too awful! Where was Dr. Simmons with that medicine? She was glad she was here to look after him. Folks would do such mean things to her Tea Cake if they saw him in such a fix. Treat Tea Cake like he was some mad dog when nobody in the world had more kindness about them. All he needed was for the doctor to come on with that medicine. He came back into the house without speaking, in fact, he did not seem to notice she was there and fell heavily into the bed and slept. Janie was standing by the stove washing up the dishes when he spoke to her in a queer cold voice.

“Janie, how come you can’t sleep in de same bed wid me no mo’?”

“De doctah told you tuh sleep by yo’self, Tea Cake. Don’t yuh remember him tellin’ you dat yistiddy?”

“How come you ruther sleep on uh pallet than tuh sleep in de bed wid me?” Janie saw then that he had the gun in his hand that was hanging to his side. “Answer me when Ah speak.”

“Tea Cake, Tea Cake, honey! Go lay down! Ah’ll be too glad tuh be in dere wid yuh de minute de doctor say so. Go lay back down. He’ll be heah wid some new medicine right away.”

“Janie, Ah done went through everything tuh be good tuh you and it hurt me tuh mah heart tuh be ill treated lak Ah is.”

The gun came up unsteadily but quickly and leveled at Janie’s breast. She noted that even in his delirium he took good aim. Maybe he would point to scare her, that was all.

The pistol snapped once. Instinctively Janie’s hand flew behind her on the rifle and brought it around. Most likely this would scare him off. If only the doctor would come! If anybody at all would come! She broke the rifle deftly and shoved in the shell as the second click told her that Tea Cake’s suffering brain was urging him on to kill.

“Tea Cake, put down dat gun and go back tuh bed!” Janie yelled at him as the gun wavered weakly in his hand.

He steadied himself against the jamb of the door and Janie thought to run into him and grab his arm, but she saw the quick motion of taking aim and heard the click. Saw the ferocious look in his eyes and went mad with fear as she had done in the water that time. She threw up the barrel of the rifle in frenzied hope and fear. Hope that he’d see it and run, desperate fear for her life. But if Tea Cake could have counted costs he would not have been there with the pistol in his hands. No knowledge of fear nor rifles nor anything else was there. He paid no more attention to the pointing gun than if it were Janie’s dog finger. She saw him stiffen himself all over as he leveled and took aim. The fiend in him must kill and Janie was the only thing living he saw.

The pistol and the rifle rang out almost together. The pistol just enough after the rifle to seem its echo. Tea Cake crumpled as his bullet buried itself in the joist over Janie’s head. Janie saw the look on his face and leaped forward as he crashed forward in her arms. She was trying to hover him as he closed his teeth in the flesh of her forearm. They came down heavily like that. Janie struggled to a sitting position and pried the dead Tea Cake’s teeth from her arm.

It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was just a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was her sacrificing self with Tea Cake’s head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. Janie held his head tightly to her breast and wept and thanked him wordlessly for giving her the chance for loving service. She had to hug him tight for soon he would be gone, and she had to tell him for the last time. Then the grief of outer darkness descended.

A Job for the Macarone by Damon Runyon

Miami River

(Originally published in 1937)

When the last race meeting of the winter season closes in Miami and it is time for one and all to move on to Maryland, I take a swivel at the weather reports one day and I observe that it is still down around freezing in those parts.

So thinks I to myself, I will remain in the sunny southland a while longer and continue enjoying the balmy breezes, and the ocean bathing, and all this and that, until the weather settles up yonder, and also until I acquire a blow stake, for at this time my bank-roll is worn down to a nubbin and, in fact, I do not have enough ready to get myself as far as Jax, even by walking.

Well, while waiting around Miami, trying to think of some way of making a scratch, I spend my evenings in the Shark Fin Grill, which is a little scatter on Biscayne Boulevard near the docks that is conducted by a friend of mine by the name of Chesty Charles.

He is called by this name because he has a chest like a tub and he walks with it stuck out in front of him, and the reason Charles keeps his chest out is because if he pulls it in, his stomach will take its place, only farther down, and Charles does not wish his stomach to show in this manner, as he likes to think he has a nice shape.

At the time I am speaking of, Chesty Charles is not as young as he used to be, and he wishes to go along very quiet and avoiding undue excitement, but anybody can see that he is such a character as observes a few things in his time. In fact, anybody can see that he is such a character as is around and about no little and quite some before he settles down to conducting the Shark Fin Grill.

The reason Charles calls his place the Shark Fin Grill is because it sounds nice, although, of course, Charles does not really grill anything there, and, personally, I think the name is somewhat confusing to strangers.

In fact, one night a character with a beard, from Rumson, New Jersey, comes in and orders a grilled porterhouse; and when he learns he cannot get same, he lets out a chirp that Charles has no right to call his place a grill when he does not grill anything and claims that Charles is obtaining money under false pretences.

It finally becomes necessary for Charles to tap him on the pimple with a beer mallet, and afterward the constables come around, saying what is going on here, and what do you mean by tapping people with beer mallets, and the only way Charles can wiggle out of it is by stating that the character with the beard claims that Mae West has no sex appeal. So the constables go away saying Charles does quite right and one of them has half a mind to tap the character himself with something.

Well, anyway, one night I am in the Shark Fin Grill playing rummy with Charles and there is nobody else whatever in the joint, because, by this time, the quiet season is on in Miami and Charles’s business thins out more than somewhat; and just as I beat Charles a pretty good score, who comes in but two characters in sport shirts, and one of them has that thing in his hand and he says to us like this:

“Reach,” he says. “This is a stick-up. No beefs, now,” he says.

Well, Chesty Charles and me raise our hands as high as possible, and, in fact, I am only sorry I cannot raise mine higher than possible, and Chesty Charles says: “No beefs,” he says. “But,” he says, “boys, you are on an awful bust. All you are liable to get around this drum is fleas. If there is any dough here I will be using it myself,” Chesty says.

“Well,” one of the characters says, “we will have a look at your damper, anyway. Maybe you overlook a few coarse notes here and there.”

So one character keeps that thing pointed at Chesty Charles and me, and the other goes through the cash register, but, just as Charles says, there is nothing in it. Then the character comes over and gives Charles and me a fanning, but all he finds is eighty cents on Charles, and he seems inclined to be a little vexed at the scarcity of ready between us and he acts as if he is thinking of clouting us around some for our shortage, as these git-’em-up characters will sometimes do if they are vexed, when all of a sudden Charles looks at one of the characters and speaks as follows:

“Why,” Chesty Charles says, “do my eyes deceive me, or do I behold The Macarone, out of Kansas City?”

“Why, yes,” the character says. “Why, hello, Chesty,” he says. “Meet my friend Willie,” he says. “He is out of Kansas City too. Why, I never expect to find you in such a joint as this, Chesty,” he says. “Especially a joint where there is so little dough.”

“Well,” Chesty Charles says, “you ought to drop around when the season is on. Things are livelier then. But,” he says, “sit down and let’s have a talk. I am glad to see you, Mac,” he says.

So they sit down and Chesty Charles puts out a bottle of Scotch and some glasses and we become quite sociable, to be sure, and presently The Macarone is explaining that Willie and him have been over in Havana all winter, working with a pay-off mob out of Indianapolis, Indiana, that has a store there, but that business is rotten, and they are now en route north and just stop over in Miami to pick up a few dibs, if possible, for walk-about money.

The Macarone seems to be quite an interesting character in many respects and I can see that he and Charles know each other from several places. The Macarone is maybe around forty and he is tall and black-looking, but the character he calls Willie is younger and by no means gabby, and, in fact, he scarcely has a word to say. We sit there quite a while drinking Scotches and speaking of this and that, and finally Chesty Charles says to The Macarone:

“Mac,” he says, “come to think of it, I may be able to drop something in your lap, at that. Only last night a character is in here with a right nice proposition, but,” Chesty says, “it is not in my line, so it does not interest me.”

“Chesty,” The Macarone says, “any proposition that is not in your line must be a very unusual proposition indeed. Let me hear this one,” he says.

“Well,” Chesty says, “it is a trifle unusual, but,” he says, “it seems quite sound, and I only regret that I cannot handle it in person. I am froze in here with this business and I do not feel free to engage in any outside enterprises. The character I refer to,” he says, “is Mr. Cleeburn T. Box, who lives on a big estate over here on the bay front with his nephew. Mr. Cleeburn T. Box wishes to quit these earthly scenes,” Chesty says. “He is sick and tired of living. His nerves are shot to pieces. He cannot eat. He is in tough shape.

“But,” Chesty says, “he finds he does not have the nerve to push himself off. So he wishes to find some good reliable party to push him off, for which service he will pay five thousand dollars cash money. He will deposit the dough with me,” Chesty says. “He realizes that I am quite trustworthy. It is a soft touch, Mac,” he says. “Of course,” he says, “I am entitled to the usual twenty-five percent commission for finding the plant.”

“Well,” The Macarone says, “this Mr. Box must be quite an eccentric character. But,” he says, “I can understand his reluctance about pushing himself off. Personally, I will not care to push myself off. However,” he says, “the proposition seems to have complications. I hear it is against the law in Florida to push people off, even if they wish to be pushed.”

“Well,” Chesty says, “Mr. Box thinks of this too. His idea is that the party who is to do this service for him will slip into his house over on the bay front some night and push him off while he is asleep, so he will never know what happens to him. You understand, he wishes this matter to be as unexpected and painless as possible. Then,” Chesty says, “the party can leave that thing with which he does the pushing on the premises and it will look as if Mr. Box does the pushing in person.”

“What about a club?” The Macarone says. “Or maybe a shiv? That thing makes a lot of racket.”

“Why,” Chesty says, “how can you make a club or shiv look like anything but something illegal if you use them to push anybody? You need not be afraid of making a racket, because,” he says, “no one lives within hearing distance of the joint, and Mr. Box will see that all his servants and everybody else are away from the place every night, once I give him the word the deal is on. He will place the dough at my disposal when he gets this word. Of course he does not wish to know what night it is to happen, but it must be some night soon after the transaction is agreed to.”

“Well,” The Macarone says, “this is one of the most interesting and unusual propositions ever presented to me. Personally,” he says, “I do not see why Mr. Box does not get somebody to put something in his tea. Anybody will be glad to do him such a favour.”

“He is afraid of suffering,” Chesty Charles says. “He is one of the most nervous characters I ever encounter in my life. Look, Mac,” he says, “this is a job that scarcely requires human intelligence. I have here a diagram that shows the layout of the joint.”

And with this, Chesty Charles outs with a sheet of paper and spreads it out on the table, and begins explaining it to The Macarone with his finger.

“Now,” he says, “this shows every door and window on the ground floor. Here is a wing of the house. Here is Mr. Cleeburn T. Box’s room on the ground floor overlooking the bay. Here is a French window that is never locked,” he says. “Here is his bed against the wall, not two steps from the window. Why,” Chesty says, “it is as simple as WPA.”

“Well,” The Macarone says, “you are dead sure Mr. Box will not mind being pushed? Because, after all, I do not have any reason to push him on my own account, and I am doing my best at this time to lead a clean life and keep out of unpleasant situations.”

“He will love it,” Chesty says.

So The Macarone finally says he will give the matter his earnest consideration and will let Chesty Charles have his answer in a couple of days. Then we all have some more Scotches, and it is now past closing time, and The Macarone and Willie take their departure, and I say to Chesty like this:

“Chesty,” I say, “all this sounds to me like a very strange proposition, and I do not believe anybody in this world is dumb enough to accept same.”

“Well,” Chesty says, “I always hear The Macarone is the dumbest character in the Middle West. Maybe he will wind up taking in the South too,” he says, and then Chesty laughs and we have another Scotch by ourselves before we leave.

Now, the next afternoon I am over on South Beach, taking a little dip in the ocean, and who do I run into engaged in the same pastime but The Macarone and Willie. There are also numerous other parties along the beach, splashing about in the water in their bathing suits or stretched out on the sand, and The Macarone speaks of Chesty Charles’s proposition like this:

“It sounds all right,” The Macarone says. “In fact,” he says, “it sounds so all right that the only thing that bothers me is I cannot figure out why Chesty does not take it over one hundred percent. But,” he says, “I can see Chesty is getting old, and maybe he loses his nerve. Well,” The Macarone says, “that is the way it always is with old folks. They lose their nerve.”

Then The Macarone starts swimming towards a float pretty well out in the water, and what happens when he is about halfway to the float but he starts flapping around in the water no little, and it is plain to be seen that he is in some difficulty and seems about to drown. In fact, The Macarone issues loud cries for help, but, personally, I do not see where it is any of my put-in to help him, as he is just a chance acquaintance of mine and, furthermore, I cannot swim.

Well, it seems that Willie cannot swim either, and he is saying it is too bad that The Macarone has to go in such a fashion, and he is also saying he better go and get The Macarone’s clothes before someone else thinks of it. But about this time a little Judy with about as much bathing suit on as will make a boxing glove for a mosquito jumps off the float and swims to The Macarone and seizes him by one ear and holds his head above the water until a lifeguard with hair on his chest gets out there and takes The Macarone off her hands.

Well, the lifeguard tows The Macarone ashore and rolls him over a barrel and gets enough water out of him to float the Queen Mary, and by and by The Macarone is as good as new, and he starts looking around for the little Judy who holds him up in the water.

“She almost pulls my ear out by the roots,” The Macarone says. “But,” he says, “I will forgive this torture because she saves my life. Who is she, and where is she?”

Well, the lifeguard, who turns out to be a character by the name of Dorgan, says she is Miss Mary Peering and that she works in the evening in a barbecue stand over on Fifth Street, and what is more, she is a right nifty little swimmer, but, of course, The Macarone already knows this. But now nothing will do but we must go to the barbecue stand and find Miss Mary Peering, and there she is in a blue linen uniform and with a Southern accent, dealing hot dogs and hamburger sandwiches and one thing and another, to the customers.

She is a pretty little Judy who is maybe nineteen years of age, and when The Macarone steps forward and thanks her for saving his life, she laughs and says it is nothing whatever, and at first The Macarone figures that this crack is by no means complimentary, and is disposed to chide her for same, especially when he gets to thinking about his ear. But he can see that the little Judy has no idea of getting out of line with him, and he becomes very friendly towards her.

We sit there quite a while with The Macarone talking to her between customers, and finally he asks her if she has a sweet-pea anywhere in the background of her career, and at this she bursts into tears and almost drops an order of pork and beans.

“Yes,” she says, “I am in love with a wonderful young character by the name of Lionel Box. He is a nephew of Mr. Cleeburn T. Box, and Mr. Cleeburn T. Box is greatly opposed to our friendship. Lionel wishes to marry me, but,” she says, “Mr. Cleeburn T. Box is his guardian and says he will not hear of Lionel marrying beneath his station. Lionel will be very rich when he is of age, a year from now, and then he can do as he pleases, but just at present his Uncle Cleeburn keeps him from even seeing me. Oh,” she says, “I am heartbroken.”

“Where is this Lionel now?” The Macarone says.

“That is just it,” Miss Mary Peering says. “He is home, sick with the grippe or some such, and his Uncle Cleeburn will not as much as let him answer the telephone. His Uncle Cleeburn acts awful crazy, if you ask me. But,” she says, “just wait until Lionel is of age and we can be married. Then we will go so far away from his Uncle Cleeburn he can never catch up with us again.”

Well, at this news The Macarone seems to become very thoughtful, and at first I think it is because he is disappointed to find Miss Mary Peering has a sweet-pea in the background, but after a little more talk, he thanks her again for saving his life and pats her hand and tells her not to worry about nothing, not even about what she does to his ear.

Then we go to the Shark Fin Grill and find Chesty Charles sitting out in front with his chair tilted up against the wall, and The Macarone says to him like this:

“Chesty,” he says, “have the dough on call for me from now on. I will take care of this matter for Mr. Cleeburn T. Box. I study it over carefully,” The Macarone says, “and I can see how I will render Mr. Box a service and at the same time do a new friend of mine a favor.

“In the meantime,” The Macarone says, “you keep Willie here amused. It is a one-handed job, and I do not care to use him on it in any manner, shape or form. He is a nice character, but,” The Macarone says, “he sometimes makes wrong moves. He is too handy with that thing to suit me. By the way, Chesty,” he says, “what does Mr. Cleeburn T. Box look like?”

“Well,” Chesty says, “he will be the only one you find in the room indicated on the diagram, so his looks do not make any difference, but,” he says, “he is smooth-shaved and has thick black hair.”

Now, several nights pass away, and every night I drop into the Shark Fin Grill to visit with Chesty Charles, but The Macarone does not show up but once, and this is to personally view the five thousand dollars that Charles now has in his safe, although Willie comes in now and then and sits around a while. But Willie is a most restless character, and he does not seem to be able to hold still more than a few minutes at a time, and he is always wandering around and about the city.

Finally, along towards four bells one morning, when Chesty Charles is getting ready to close the Shark Fin Grill, in walks The Macarone, and it is plain to be seen that he has something on his mind.

A couple of customers are still in the joint and The Macarone waits until they depart, and then he steps over to the bar, where Chesty Charles is working, and gazes at Chesty for quite a spell without saying as much as aye, yes, or no.

“Well?” Chesty says.

“Well, Chesty,” The Macarone says, “I go to the home of your Mr. Cleeburn T. Box a little while ago. It is a nice place. A little more shrubbery than we like in Kansas City, but still a nice place. It must stand somebody maybe half a million. I follow your diagram, Chesty,” he says. “I find the wing marked X and I make my way through plenty of cactus and Spanish bayonets, and I do not know what all else, and enter the house by way of an open French window.

“I find myself in a room in which there are no lights, but,” The Macarone says, “as soon as my eyes become accustomed to the darkness, I can see that is all just as the diagram shows. There is a bed within a few steps of the window and there is a character asleep on the bed. He is snoring pretty good too. In fact,” The Macarone says, “he is snoring about as good as anybody I ever hear, and I do not bar Willie, who is a wonderful snorer.”

“All right,” Chesty Charles says.

“Show me the dough again, Chesty,” The Macarone says.

So Chesty goes to his safe and opens it and outs with a nice package of the soft and places it on the back bar where The Macarone can see it, and the sight of the money seems to please The Macarone no little.

“All right,” Chesty says. “Then what?”

“Well, Chesty,” The Macarone says, “there I am with that thing in my hand, and there is this character on the bed asleep, and there is no sound except his snoring and the wind in some palm trees outside. Chesty,” he says, “are you ever in a strange house at night with the wind working on the palm trees outside?”

“No,” Chesty says. “I do not care for palm trees.”

“It is a lonesome sound,” The Macarone says. “Well,” he says, “I step over to the bed, and I can see by the outline of the character on the bed that he is sleeping on his back, which is a good thing, as it saves me the trouble of turning him over and maybe waking him up. You see, Chesty,” he says, “I give this matter some scientific study beforehand. I figure that the right idea in this case is to push this character in such a manner that there can be no doubt that he pushes himself, so it must be done from in front, and from close up.

“Well,” The Macarone says, “I wait right over this character on the bed until my eyes make out the outline of his face in the dark, and I put that thing down close to his nose, and just as I am about to give it to him, the moon comes out from behind a cloud over the bay and spills plenty of light through the open French window and over the character on the bed.

“And,” The Macarone says, “I observe that this character on the bed is holding some object clasped to his breast, and that he has a large smile on his face, as if he is dreaming very pleasant dreams, indeed; and when I gently remove the object from his fingers, thinking it may be something of value to me, and hold it up to the light, what is it but a framed stand photograph of a young friend of mine by the name of Miss Mary Peering.

“But,” The Macarone says, “I hope and trust that no one will ever relate to Miss Mary Peering the story of me finding this character asleep with her picture, and snoring, because,” he says, “snoring is without doubt a great knock to romance.”

“So?” Chesty Charles says.

“So,” The Macarone says, “I come away as quietly as possible without disturbing the character on the bed, and here I am, Chesty, and there you are, and it comes to my mind that somebody tries to drop me in on a great piece of skullduggery.”

And all of a sudden, The Macarone outs with that thing and jams the nozzle of it into Chesty Charles’s chest, and says:

“Hand over that dough, Chesty,” he says. “A nice thing you are trying to get a respectable character like me into, because you know very well it cannot be your Mr. Cleeburn T. Box on the bed in that room with Miss Mary Peering’s photograph clasped to his breast and smiling so. Chesty,” he says, “I fear you almost make a criminal of me, and for two cents I will give you a pushing for your own self, right here and now.”

“Why, Mac,” Chesty says, “you are a trifle hasty. If it is not Mr. Cleeburn T. Box in that bed, I cannot think who it can be, but,” he says, “maybe some last-minute switch comes up in the occupant of the bed by accident. Maybe it is something Mr. Cleeburn T. Box will easily explain when I see him again. Why,” Chesty says, “I cannot believe Mr. Cleeburn T. Box means any fraud in this matter. He seems to me to be a nice, honest character, and very sincere in his wish to be pushed.”

Then Chesty Charles goes on to state that if there is any fraud in this matter, he is also a victim of same, and he says he will surely speak harshly to Mr. Cleeburn T. Box about it the first time he gets a chance. In fact, Chesty Charles becomes quite indignant when he gets to thinking that maybe Mr. Cleeburn T. Box may be deceiving him, and finally The Macarone says:

“Well, all right,” he says. “Maybe you are not in on anything, at that, and, in fact, I do not see what it is all about, anyway; but,” he says, “it is my opinion that your Mr. Cleeburn T. Box is without doubt nothing but a great scalawag somewhere. Anyway, hand over the dough, Chesty,” he says. “I am going to collect on my good intentions.”

So Chesty Charles takes the package off the back bar and hands it over to The Macarone, and as The Macarone is disposing of it in his pants’ pocket, Chesty says to him like this: “But look, Mac,” he says, “I am entitled to my twenty-five percent for finding the plant, just the same.”

Well, The Macarone seems to be thinking this over, and, personally, I figure there is much justice in what Chesty Charles says, and while The Macarone is thinking, there is a noise at the door of somebody coming in, and The Macarone hides that thing under his coat, though I notice he keeps his hand under there, too, until it turns out that the party coming in is nobody but Willie.

“Well,” Willie says, “I have quite an interesting experience just now while I am taking a stroll away out on the Boulevard. It is right pretty out that way, to be sure,” he says. “I meet a cop and get to talking to him about this and that, and while we are talking the cop says, “Good evening, Mr. Box,” to a character who goes walking past.

“The cop says this character is Mr. Cleeburn T. Box,” Willie says. “I say Mr. Box looks worried, and the cop says yes, his nephew is sick, and maybe he is worrying about him. But,” Willie says, “the cop says, ‘If I am Mr. Box, I will not be worrying about such a thing, because if the nephew dies before he comes of age, Mr. Box is the sole heir to his brother’s estate of maybe ten million dollars, and the nephew is not yet of age.’

“‘Well, cop,’ I say,” Willie says, “‘are you sure this is Mr. Cleeburn T. Box?’ and the cop says yes, he knows him for over ten years, and that he meets up with him every night on the Boulevard for the past week, just the same as tonight, because it seems Mr. Cleeburn T. Box takes to strolling that way quite some lately.

“So,” Willie says, “I figure to save everybody a lot of bother, and I follow Mr. Cleeburn T. Box away out the Boulevard after I leave the cop, and when I get to a spot that seems nice and quiet and with nobody around, I step close enough for powder marks to show good and give it to Mr. Cleeburn T. Box between the eyes. Then,” Willie says, “I leave that thing in his right hand, and if they do not say it is a clear case of him pushing himself when they find him, I will eat my hat.”

“Willie,” The Macarone says, “is your Mr. Cleeburn T. Box clean-shaved and does he have thick black hair?”

“Why, no,” Willie says. “He has a big mouser on his upper lip and no hair whatsoever on his head. In fact,” he says, “he is as bald as a biscuit, and maybe balder.”

Now, at this The Macarone turns to Chesty Charles, but by the time he is half turned, Chesty is out the back door of the Shark Fin Grill and is taking it on the Jesse Owens up the street, and The Macarone seems greatly surprised and somewhat disappointed, and says to me like this:

“Well,” he says, “Willie and me cannot wait for Chesty to return, but,” he says, “you can tell him for me that, under the circumstances, I am compelled to reject his request for twenty-five percent for finding the plant. And,” The Macarone says, “if ever you hear of the nephew of the late Mr. Cleeburn T. Box beefing about a missing photograph of Miss Mary Peering, you can tell him that it is in good hands.”

A Taste for Cognac by Brett Halliday