CHAPTER VIII
THE CHASE BEGINS
I slept like a log and was awake, anxious to turn out, at the peep of dawn. But Gates was ahead of me when I reached the deck. Our anchor had just been hoisted, and every sail was set, though nearly limp with a negligible breeze.
"What news?" I asked.
"Nothing, sir; leastwise nothing of the Orchid. She's gone."
"We expected that. Any idea which way?"
"I talked to a sponge fisher who came by a while back, sir, and he said a schooner yacht sailed about midnight, or maybe later; north, he said. But she carn't have got far, as there hasn't been hardly any air stirring all night till this little one now. If it wasn't so heavy off there we might see her, I farncy. The mate's aloft, sir."
I looked up and saw him steadily sweeping the distance with his binoculars; but, as Gates had said, the horizon in all directions was heavy, and in such weather our search, indeed, seemed next to useless. With the world a playground, how could we find this vagrant yacht.
Then I let my eyes rest on the tinted east, marvelling at what a curiously beautiful, dangerously sweet old world this is. The sky and water were beginning to be touched by the first faint tones of rose, the dawn was bringing its enchantment to this marriage-time of the black and white. Over in the Key West barracks a bugler would soon be blowing reveille; down in the sleeping town stumpy little street cars would squeak from their sheds and clang their discordant gongs through the narrow thoroughfares. But farther yet to the northeast, in the Florida I best knew and loved, a whooping crane would startle the solitude with its uncanny cry, the alligators would croak their guttural grunts at waking time, while, here and there in the shadowy forest, the whine of a skulking panther would strike terror to the hearts of gentler things. Ah, the trackless wilderness of dreamy Florida, where nature moves on padded foot and silent wing!