“As long as we do not advise taking the ladies up to-day, why not come with us for a visit to our sugar plantation,” suggested Bob.
“What is there to see there?” pouted Eleanor, still angry.
“Well, Bill and I have staked a little cane plantation over there and we haven’t inspected our property for two weeks. We were so busy practicing for the ball game, and then you came on the scene. If you’ve never visited a sugarcane plantation it will prove to be interesting, I’m sure.”
As nothing else had been planned to take the place of the aeroplane trip that day, the girls accepted the offer to inspect the small plantation.
Having traveled swiftly over the rich country where so little farming was done because of the exhausting heat, and the prolific crops of nature-grown fruits and herbs, the two seven-passenger cars came to a very pretty place. Bill and Bob who were driving, turned in to a rough road more like a country lane, and passed acres of cane sugar. The two young owners pointed with pride to their property, and well they might.
“The man of whom we leased this acreage said he had a yield of from six to eight tons of sucrose an acre every year. But he had more land than he could cultivate, hence he leased us this acreage and agreed to keep an eye on our men and the work, whenever he could. The richness of the soil and the climate gives the cane grown here an unusual amount of saccharine to the acre,” Bill explained, as his hearers looked over the vast fields of cane and admired his ambitions.
“Gee, Bill! I don’t know but that I’ll go in with you boys on sugar raising. I’m sure I’d like it down here,” said Jack Baxter. “How about it, Ray, want to go fifty-fifty in this?”
Mr. Dalken laughed heartily. “If Ray knows you as well as I do, he’ll understand that you fall for every new project placed before you. If some one caught you in the right mood and told you that your fortune was to be had in digging a Canal through South America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, you’d agree with them and start in to dig. But you’d get tired of it in a week and shirk the work.”
“Why, Dalky, you slander my ideals!” declared Jack.
“Do I? What about Grizzly Slide and your determination to take up mining out on the peaks of the Rockies? Then in New York you went so far as to furnish an apartment for the sake of studying interior decorating,” said Mr. Dalken.