OR,
Flying for Fun
[CHAPTER I]
THE CREOLE COFFEE HOUSE
The lower end of Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida, ends in a busy shipping and fish wharf. On each side of this are to be found, always, scores of sailing vessels and a jam of oyster and fish boats.
In other days, about the head of this old wharf was to be found a maze of cheap boarding houses, restaurants and saloons devoted to the entertainment of sailors. There were to be found, too, other resorts known as “coffee houses”—institutions adapted from West Indian life, which have now almost wholly disappeared. In these, might be seen by night motley collections of brown old tars sipping curacao and café noir to the strident chatter of captive parrots and cockatoos.
At the present time, one only of these old coffee houses remains. In this, some of the maritime flavor of former days is retained in the person of an old Creole who conducts the resort. But, nowadays, the creole’s most profitable trade is from busy merchants who seek his cabaret at noon for a cup of old fashioned coffee. The sailors who once congregated in his shop have almost wholly passed away.
Some of the picturesqueness of the creole coffee house remains, however, and it was this that drew Bob Balfour to the place just after dark on a fine evening in mid-February. Robert, or Bob Balfour, was the only child of a well-to-do manufacturer in Chicago. Between sixteen and seventeen years of age, it had been discovered suddenly that the boy’s health was failing. On the order of a physician Bob had gone south with his mother to await the return of pleasant weather in the north.
“You’ll be all right in a short time,” the family doctor explained reassuringly, “if you live in the open air and sunshine and get plenty of sea breeze.” Here he paused and shook his head ominously. “But you must stay out of doors and give up books,” he added sweeping his hand towards Bob’s crammed bookcase.
“That’s it,” exclaimed Bob’s father; “this reading is all right, but the boy has had too much of it. He reads everything. He’s got books that I’d never think of buying—regular histories and scientific things.”