It was hard as a baseball, frozen to the very core.
Arnold groaned. "You're right, Terry. We're done."
They were. When morning dawned crisp and clear, and the red sun rose in a cloudless sky, every orange in South Florida was a lump of ice. The green leaves, so stiff and firm overnight, hung limp and blackened. Not only was the crop gone, but the trees themselves were terribly injured.
Arnold and Terence surveyed the scene of ruin in despair.
"Our first decent crop!" growled Chesney. "We'll have to start all over again."
"'Tis not that I'm thinking of," said Terence Burke. "'Tis Cassidy."
"The brute! I'd forgotten him!" exclaimed Arnold in dismay.
"Small chance he's give ye of forgetting him. More be token, here comes the spalpeen."
A short, square man with a flat face, a turn-up nose, and eyes like a pig's, came through the slip bars by the road. In an ill moment the two youngsters had given this Irish-American a mortgage on their grove, a step they had never ceased regretting.
"Good-mornin' to ye, byes. Th' quarther's interest is due. Have ye it for me?"