"All right, Richard. Good-by, my boy. Write me whenever you need money."
"Perhaps I can't write as often as that. But I'll send you bulletins from time to time."
"I depend on you, Richard. Jephson must not lose."
"Leave it to me. The Palm Beach Special at midnight. And after that—Miss Cynthia Meyrick!"
CHAPTER III
JOURNEYS END IN—TAXI BILLS
No matter how swiftly your train has sped through the Carolinas and Georgia, when it crosses the line into Florida a wasting languor overtakes it. Then it hesitates, sighs and creeps across the fiat yellow landscape like an aged alligator. Now and again it stops completely in the midst of nothing, as who should say: "You came down to see the South, didn't you? Well, look about you."
The Palm Beach Special on which Mr. Minot rode was no exception to this rule. It entered Florida and a state of innocuous desuetude at one and the same time. After a tremendous struggle, it gasped its way into Jacksonville about nine o'clock of the Monday morning following. Reluctant as Romeo in his famous exit from Juliet's boudoir, it got out of Jacksonville an hour later. And San Marco was just two hours away, according to that excellent book of light fiction so widely read in the South—the time-table.
It seemed to Dick Minot that he had been looking out of a car window for a couple of eternities. Save for the diversion at Jacksonville, nothing had happened to brighten that long and wearisome journey. He wanted, now, to glance across the car aisle toward the diversion at Jacksonville. Yet it hardly seemed polite—so soon. Wherefore he continued to gaze out at the monotonous landscape.
For half a mile the train served its masters. Then, with a pathetic groan, it paused. Still Mr. Minot gazed out the window. He gazed so long that he saw a family of razor-backs, passed a quarter of a mile back, catch up with the train and trot scornfully by. After that he kept his eyes on the live oaks and evergreens, to whose topmost branches hung gray moss like whiskers on a western senator.