“Wall,” he drawled in his customary slow fashion, “here’s hopin’ we ain’t agoin’ to be knocked out in our calculations tonight, but get a line on what the boys are doin’ up the coast, eh, partner?”
“Won’t be our fault if we don’t,” said Jack, who doubtless recognized from the signs that his mate had something in his mind, which he meant to spring on him by cautious insinuations and half questions.
“A right decent crate that was we saw pass over early this morning I’d say, old hoss,” continued Perk, nodding his head as if to punctuate his remarks and also to cause his thoughts to flow more smoothly. “I had a good peep at it as we lay behind that bunch o’ saw palmetto out front, an’ unless I’m away off in my guess, she was a Curtiss-Robin ship–a big crate in the bargain.”
“They need them big in their line of business,” Jack went on significantly. “A full cargo of wet goods is pretty heavy, you know, Perk.”
“You said it, partner,” assented the other, grinning amiably and yet with a shade of Yankee cunning. “An’ what’s more to the p’int the guy handlin’ the stick was no slouch at his job, b’lieve me. I wonder now could he have been that Oscar Gleeb we been hearin’ so much about since comin’ down here,–got an idea he might abeen, ain’t you, Boss?”
“Just as like as not,” Jack told him.
“Huh! Some go as far as to say he used to be a Boche pilot in that fuss across the big water,” continued Perk, reflectively, as though certain memories of the long-ago had awakened in his brain–recollections that breathed of action, staccato machine-gun fire, exploding shells, and the terrible odor of gas that had poisoned so many of his former mates.
“Yes, they said there wasn’t any doubt about that,” Jack asserted. “After the war was over and he couldn’t find work in his home country, he managed to get to America and has cut quite a figure in flying circles. I reckon he was tempted by the big money in the smuggling game to take a job with this combine along the coast and has been fetching heaps of cargoes ashore from vessels anchored far out on the gulf, or even across from Bimini or Santa Fe Beach near Havana over in Cuba.”
“By jinks!” ejaculated Perk, “that there’s the place we learned they was shippin’ Chinks over to Florida from, ain’t it Jack, boy?”
“Just what it was,” admitted the other. “It seems that this big combine, made up of rich American sporting men, with a mixture of Cubans and adventurers from all nations, doubles up in crashing Uncle Sam’s coast gates with aliens, as well as hard stuff in bottles and barrels.”