"How should I know?" replied Munsell as innocently; the inference being that he knew perfectly well that there was nothing worth purchasing in the Causeway swamp.
But when White went away he was a trifle worried, and he wondered uneasily why anybody else at that particular time should happen to invest in swampy real estate along the Spanish Causeway.
He knew the Spanish Causeway. In youthful and prosperous days, when his parents were alive, they had once wintered at Verbena Inlet.
And on several occasions he had been taken on excursions to the so-called Spanish Causeway—a dike-shaped path, partly ruined, made of marl and shell, which traversed the endless swamps of Seminole County, and was supposed to have been built by De Soto and his Spaniards.
But whoever built it, Spaniard, Seminole, or the prehistoric people antedating both, there it still was, a ruined remnant of highway penetrating the otherwise impassable swamps.
For miles across the wilderness of cypress, palmetto, oak, and depthless mud it stretched—a[272] crumbling but dry runway for deer, panther, bear, black wolf, and Seminole. And excursion parties from the great hotels at Verbena often picnicked at its intersection with the forest road, but ventured no farther along the dismal, forbidding, and snake-infested ridge which ran anywhere between six inches and six feet above the level of the evil-looking marsh flanking it on either side.
In the care-free days of school, of affluence, and of youth, White had been taken to gaze upon this alleged relic of Spanish glory. He now remembered it very clearly.
And that night, aboard the luxurious Verbena Special, he lay in his bunk and dreamed dreams awake, which almost overwhelmed him with their magnificence. But when he slept his dreams were uneasy, interspersed with vague visions of women who came in regiments through flowering jungles to drive him out of his own property. It was a horrid sort of nightmare, for they pelted him with iron-bound copies of Valdez, knocking him almost senseless into the mud. And it seemed to him that he might have perished there had not his little red-haired neighbour extended a slender, helping hand in the nick of time.
Dreaming of her he awoke, still shaking with the experience. And all that day he read in his[273] book and pored over the map attached to it, until the locomotive whistled for St. Augustine, and he was obliged to disembark for the night.
However, next morning he was on his way to Verbena, the train flying through a steady whirlwind of driving sand. And everywhere in the sunshine stretched the flat-woods, magnificently green—endless miles of pine and oak and palmetto, set with brilliant glades of vast, flat fields of wild phlox over which butterflies hovered.