Spend this winter in balmy Florida.
Come to the Land of Perpetual Sunshine.
Golf, tennis, driving, shooting, boating, fishing, all of the best.
There was more, but he had no heart for it; he was disappointed and puzzled. This picture had, after all, nothing to do with him. It was a chance, and yet, what a strange chance! It troubled and upset him. His black, round-featured face took on deep wrinkles of perplexity. The “misery” which had hung darkly on his horizon for weeks engulfed him without warning. But in the very bitterness of his melancholy he knew at last his disease. It was not champagne or recreation that he needed, not even a “po’k-chop,” although his desire for it had been a symptom, a groping for a too homeopathic remedy: he was homesick.
Easy, childish tears came into his eyes, and ran over his shining cheeks. He shivered forlornly with a sudden sense of cold, and absently clutched at the lapels of his gorgeous, fur-lined ulster.
Then in abrupt reaction he laughed aloud, so that the shrill, musical falsetto startled the passers-by, and in another moment a little semicircle of the curious watched spellbound as a black man, exquisitely appareled, danced in wild, loose grace before the dull background of a somewhat grimy and apparently vacant window. A newsboy recognized him.
He heard his name being passed from mouth to mouth, and came partly to his senses. He stopped dancing, and grinned at them.
“Say, you are Gideon, ain’t you?” his discoverer demanded, with a sort of reverent audacity.
“Yaas, seh,” said Gideon; “that’s me. Yo’ shu got it right.” He broke into a joyous peal of laughter—the laughter that had made him famous, and bowed deeply before him. “Gideon—posi-tive-ly his las’ puffawmunce.” Turning, he dashed for a passing trolley, and, still laughing, swung aboard.
He was naturally honest. In a land of easy morality his friends had accounted him something of a paragon; nor had Stuhk ever had anything but praise for him. But now he crushed aside the ethics of his intent without a single troubled thought. Running away has always been inherent in the negro. He gave one regretful thought to the gorgeous wardrobe he was leaving behind him; but he dared not return for it. Stuhk might have taken it into his head to go back to their rooms. He must content himself with the reflection that he was at that moment wearing his best.