Gerda drew a deep breath. The amount left her speechless. They drove in silence for some minutes, then she said: “I guess you can do what you like with all that money.”
Denny nodded. “It certainly helps,” he said lightly.
They were running through a road bordered by Australian pine windbreaks which swayed in the increasing wind.
Stella said suddenly: “Look, the wind is rising. Do you see the trees? It is getting rough.”
“Well, we’ll be all right in this bus,” Denny said confidently. “This old hearse doesn’t leak; it can blow and rain as much as it likes.”
The sun had given place to a big moon. It was almost dark now and Denny switched on his head-lamps. “I like driving in the dark,” he said, “especially in this country. Look at the river now. It looks as if it were on fire.”
The wind had whipped the water into large waves which flickered like tongues of flame. Overhead small clouds began to race across the moonlit sky, joining up with each other rapidly. They were dark clouds that fled before the wind, gradually building up a barrier between the earth and the moon.
“This looks like it,” Denny said as the landscape began to fade into darkness. “I guess if it gets too bad we’ll have to put up at Fort Pierce.” A thought suddenly struck him. “Haven’t you girls got any luggage?”
Gerda said, “No.”
There was a long silence and then Denny said, “You two seem to be having a bad time.” He felt uncomfortable, as most very wealthy people do when they run into real poverty. He began to wish he hadn’t given them a ride. He supposed that they were going to be a damn nuisance before he had seen the last of them.