By Stella Wynne Herron
Colonel Scipio Breckenbridge stopped polishing the lighthouse lamp and stared out across Lone Palm Key to where the blazing yellow sand met the dark blue waters of the Gulf. Yes—there they were again, hobnobbing on the beach—the alien Higgins, his face a beef red from alcohol within and the tropic sun without, stretched prone, the breeze flapping his loose sailor’s pants around his skinny ankles—the Captain erecting a tarpaulin tent against the day of the great four-yearly event, the presidential election.
Yes, indeed. Make no mistake. Lone Palm Key is a part of the United States. This speck of an island that flips up out of the Gulf like the tip end of a fish’s tail is listed as the sixty-sixth precinct of Florida. For twenty years now the Colonel had religiously cast one vote for the Democratic candidate; the Captain, one for the Republican candidate. For twenty years—the Captain and the Colonel being the entire population—the sixty-sixth had split fifty-fifty—and for twenty years both had cherished the secret hope of one day carrying it.
Mr. Higgins had drifted into Lone Palm—literally—on a hatch top of the ill-fated Petrel two months before, and it was not long before his lamentable failing made itself manifest. Mr. Higgins was unhappy unless drunk. When his entertainment ceased, and it looked as if, through sheer thirst, he would have to consent to be taken to Key West with the Captain’s next cargo of sponges—non-human—he had discovered a cast-up keg of whiskey. Such an act of Providence almost restored his waning faith in God. But, alas! for an acrid week now the sacred fount had been dry. This time he would surely be frozen out—— But, now, here was the Captain encouragingly friendly, almost chummy, with him——
The Colonel strode across to the recumbent Higgins, and touched him with his foot.
“Higgins,” he asked, “do yo’ reckon to vote on Lone Palm this election?”
“I ’ave that intention,” replied Mr. Higgins gently.
“Are yo’—Republican or—Democrat?” The Colonel’s voice trembled in spite of himself.
“I ’aven’t decided—yet,” and Mr. Higgins let his gaze drift again skyward.
The Colonel met the Captain’s perfidious eyes across the prostrate form of the potential majority. In that silent glance there was a declaration of bloody war.