"I don't want dope," he said pleasantly, "I merely want a few facts--if your company deals in them."

"Florida," began the suave gentleman, watching the effect of his words, "is the garden of the world." Then he stopped, discouraged, for White was grinning at him.

"It won't do," said White amiably.

"No?" queried the suave gentleman, the ghost of a grin on his own smooth countenance.

"No, it won't do. Now, if you will restrain your very natural enthusiasm and let me ask a few questions----"

"Go ahead," said the suave gentleman, whose name was Munsell. "But I don't believe we have anything to suit you in Seminole County."

"Oh, I don't know," returned White coolly, "is it _all_ under water?"

"There are a few sh.e.l.l mounds. The highest is nearly ten inches above water. We call them hills."

"I might wish to acquire one of those mountain ranges," remarked White seriously.

After a moment they both laughed.

"Are you in the game yourself?" inquired Mr. Munsell.

"Well, my game is a trifle different."

"Oh. Do you care to be more explicit?"

White shook his head:

"No; what's the use? But I'll say this: it isn't the 'Perpetual Sunshine and Orange Grove' game, or how to become a millionaire in three years."

"No?" grinned Munsell, lifting his expressive eyebrows.

White bent over the map for a few moments.

"Here," he said carelessly, "is the Spanish Causeway and the Coakachee River. It's all swamp and jungle, I suppose--although I see you have it plotted into orange groves, truck gardens, pineapple plantations, and villas."

Munsell made a last but hopeless effort. "Some day," he began, with dignity--but White's calm wink discouraged further attempts. Then the young man tapped with his pencil lots numbered from 200 to 210, slowly, going over them again for emphasis.

"Are those what you want?" asked Munsell.

"Those are what I want."

"All right. Only I can't give you 210."

"Why not?"

"Yesterday a party took a strip along the Causeway including half of 210 up to 220."

"Can't I get all of 210?"

"I'll ask the party. Where can I address you?"

White stood up. "Have everything ready Tuesday. I'll be in with the cash."

XXVII

And on Tuesday he kept his word and the land was his for a few hundred dollars--all except the half of Lot No. 210, which it appeared the "party" declined to sell, refusing to consider any profit whatever.

"It's like a woman," remarked Munsell.

"Is your 'party' a woman?"

"Yes. I guess she's into some game or other, too. Say, what is this Seminole County game, Mr. White?--if you don't mind my asking, now that you have taken t.i.tle to your--h'm!--orange grove."

"Why do you think there is any particular game afoot?" inquired the young man curiously.

"Oh, come! _You_ know what you're buying. And that young lady knew, too.

You've both bought a few acres of cypress swamp and you know it. What do you think is in it?"

"Snakes," said White coolly.

"Oh, _I_ know," said Munsell. "You think there's marl and phosphoric rock."

"And isn't there?" asked White innocently.

"How should _I_ know?" replied Munsell as innocently; the inference being that he knew perfectly well that there was nothing worth purchasing in the Causeway swamp.

But when White went away he was a trifle worried, and he wondered uneasily why anybody else at that particular time should happen to invest in swampy real estate along the Spanish Causeway.

He knew the Spanish Causeway. In youthful and prosperous days, when his parents were alive, they had once wintered at Verbena Inlet.

And on several occasions he had been taken on excursions to the so-called Spanish Causeway--a dike-shaped path, partly ruined, made of marl and sh.e.l.l, which traversed the endless swamps of Seminole County, and was supposed to have been built by De Soto and his Spaniards.

But whoever built it, Spaniard, Seminole, or the prehistoric people antedating both, there it still was, a ruined remnant of highway penetrating the otherwise impa.s.sable swamps.

For miles across the wilderness of cypress, palmetto, oak, and depthless mud it stretched--a crumbling but dry runway for deer, panther, bear, black wolf, and Seminole. And excursion parties from the great hotels at Verbena often picnicked at its intersection with the forest road, but ventured no farther along the dismal, forbidding, and snake-infested ridge which ran anywhere between six inches and six feet above the level of the evil-looking marsh flanking it on either side.

In the care-free days of school, of affluence, and of youth, White had been taken to gaze upon this alleged relic of Spanish glory. He now remembered it very clearly.

And that night, aboard the luxurious Verbena Special, he lay in his bunk and dreamed dreams awake, which almost overwhelmed him with their magnificence. But when he slept his dreams were uneasy, interspersed with vague visions of women who came in regiments through flowering jungles to drive him out of his own property. It was a horrid sort of nightmare, for they pelted him with iron-bound copies of Valdez, knocking him almost senseless into the mud. And it seemed to him that he might have perished there had not his little red-haired neighbour extended a slender, helping hand in the nick of time.

Dreaming of her he awoke, still shaking with the experience. And all that day he read in his book and pored over the map attached to it, until the locomotive whistled for St. Augustine, and he was obliged to disembark for the night.

However, next morning he was on his way to Verbena, the train flying through a steady whirlwind of driving sand. And everywhere in the sunshine stretched the flat-woods, magnificently green--endless miles of pine and oak and palmetto, set with brilliant glades of vast, flat fields of wild phlox over which b.u.t.terflies hovered.