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TITLE: BLACK CAESAR'S CLAN
AUTHOR: ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
EBOOK: E01202 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, MOST GRATEFULLY
TO MY FRIEND
JOHN E. PICKETT
EDITOR OF
"THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN"

FOREWORD

A wiggling, brainless, slimy atom began it.  He and trillions
of his kind.  He was the Coral Worm ("Anthozoa," if you prefer).

He and his tribe lived and died on the sea-bottom, successive
generations piling higher on the skeletons and lifework--or
the life-loafing, for they were lazy atoms--of those that went
before.  At last the coral reef crawled upward until in
uncharted waters it was tall enough to smash a wooden
ship-keel.

Then, above the surface of the waves it nosed its way, grayish
white, whalebacked.  From a hundred miles distant floated a
cigar-shaped mangrove-bud, bobbing vertically, through the
ocean, until it chanced to touch the new-risen coral reef.
The mangrove, alone of all trees, will sprout and grow in salt
water.  The mangrove's trunk, alone of all trunks, is
impervious to the corrosive action of the sea.

At once the bud set to work.  It drove an anchor-root into the
reef, then other roots and still others.  It shot up to the
height of a foot or two, and thence sent thick red-brown roots
straight downward into the coral again.

And so on, until it had formed a tangled root-fence for many
yards alongshore.  After which, its work being done, the
mangrove proceeded to grow upward into a big and glossy-leaved
shade-tree, making buds for further fences.

Meanwhile, every particle of floating seaweed, every dead fish
or animal, all vegetation, etc., which chanced to wash into
that fence-tangle, stayed there.  It is easier for matter, as
well as for man, to get entangled in mangrove roots than to
get out again.

The sun and the rain did their work on this decaying stuff.
Thus, soil was formed, atop the coral and in the hollows
scooped out of its surface by wind or tide.

Presently, a coconut, hurled from its stem in the Bahamas or
in Cuba, by a hurricane, set its palmleaf sail-sprout and was
gale-driven across the intervening seas, floating ashore on
the new-risen land.  There it sprouted.  Birds, winds, waves,
brought germs of other trees.  The subtropical island was
complete.

Island, key, reef--reef, key, island--with the intervening
gaps of azure-emerald water, bridged, bit by bit, by the
coral,--to-day a sea-surface, to-morrow a gray-white reef,
next day a mangrove hedge, and the next an expanse of
spectacular verdure and glistening gray-white sand.

So Florida was born.

So, at least, its southern portion was born, and is still in
daily process of birth.  And, according to Agassiz and many
another, the entire Peninsula may have arisen in this fashion,
from the green-blue sea.

Dredge and shovel are laboring hard to guide or check the
endless undersea coral growth before bay and channel and
lagoon shall all be dry land.  The wormlike, lazy,
fast-multiplying Anthozoa is fighting passively but with
terrific power, to set at naught all man's might and wit.

In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a
wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter
tourists throng by the hundred thousand.  In time, too, these
sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny
peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of
wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida
is a Career, not a Resort.

As in every land which has grown swiftly and along different
lines from the rest of the country, there still are mystery
and romance and thrills to be found lurking among the keys and
back of the mangrove-swamps and along the mystic reaches of
sunset shoreline.

With awkward and inexpert touch, my story seeks to set forth
some of these.

Understand, please, that this book is rank melodrama.  It has
scant literary quality.  It is not planned to edify.  Its only
mission is to entertain you and,--if you belong to the
action-loving majority, to give you an occasional thrill.

Perhaps you will like it.  Perhaps you will not.  But I do not
think you will go to sleep over it.  There are worse
recommendations than that for any book.
                    ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE.
"Sunnybank,"
Pompton Lakes,
New Jersey.

BLACK CAESAR'S CLAN

CHAPTER I

THE HIDDEN PATH

Overhead sang the steady trade wind, tempering the golden
sunshine's heat.  To eastward, under an incredibly blue sky,
stretched the more incredibly multi-hued waters of Biscayne
Bay, the snow-white wonder-city of Miami dreaming on its
shores.

Dividing the residence and business part of the city from the
giant hotels, Flagler Avenue split the mass of buildings, from
back-country to bay.  To its westward side spread the shaded
expanse of Royal Palm Park, with its deep-shaded short lane of
Australian pines, its rustling palm trees, its white church
and its frond-flecked vistas of grass.

Here, scarce a quarter-century ago, a sandspit had broiled
beneath an untempered sun.  Shadeless, grassless, it had been
an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for
mosquitoes.  Then had come the hand of man.  First, the Royal
Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of
nothingness.  Then other caravansaries.  Palm and pine and
vivid lawn-grass had followed.  The mosquitoes had fled far
back to the mangrove swamps.  And a rarely beautiful White
City had sprung up.

It was Sunday morning.  From the park's bandstand, William J.
Bryan was preaching to his open-air Sunday School class of
tourists, two thousand strong.  Around the bandstand the
audience stood or sat in rapt interest.

The Australian-pine lane, to the rear, was lined with all
manner of automobiles, from limousine to battered flivver.
The cars' occupants listened as best they could could--through
the whirr of sea-planes and the soft hum of Sabbath traffic
and the dry slither of a myriad grating palm-fronds in the
trade-wind's wake--to the preacher's words.

The space of shaded grass, between lane and hotel-grounds and
bandstand, was starred by white-clad children, and by men who
sprawled drowsily upon the springy turf, their straw hats
tilted above their eyes.  The time was mid-February.  The
thermometers on the Royal Palm veranda registered
seventy-three.  No rain had fallen in weeks to mar the
weather's perfection.

"Scientists are spending $5,000,000 to send an expedition into
Africa in search of the 'missing-link'!" the orator was
thundering.  "It would be better for them to spend all or part
of that money, in seeking closer connection with their
Heavenly Father, than with the Brutes!"

A buzz of approval swept the listeners.  That same buzz came
irritatingly to the ears of a none-too-sprucely dressed young
man who lay, with eyes shut, under the shifting shade of a
giant palm, a hundred yards away.  He had not caught the
phrase which inspired the applause--thanks to the confusion of
street sounds and the multiple dry rattle of the palm-fronds
and the whirring passage of a sea-plane which circled above
park and bay.  But the buzz aroused him.

He had not been asleep.  Prone on his back, hat pulled over
his upper face, he had been lying motionless there, for the
best part of an hour.  Now, stretching, he got to his feet in
leisurely fashion, brushed perfunctorily at his rumpled
clothes, and turned his steps toward the double line of plumy
Australian pines which bordered the lane between hotel grounds
and avenue.

Only once did he hesitate in his slouching progress.  That was
when he chanced to come alongside one of the cars, in the long
rank, drawn up in the shade.  The machine's front seat was
occupied by a giant of a man, all in white silk, a man of
middle age, blonde and bearded, a man who, but for his modern
costume, might well have posed as a Norse Viking.

The splendid breadth of shoulder and depth of chest caught the
wanderer's glance and won his grudging approval.  Thence, his
elaborately careless gaze shifted to the car's rear seat where
sat a girl.  He noted she was small and dainty and tanned and
dressed in white sport-clothes.  Also, that one of her arms
was passed around the shoulder of a big young gold-and-white
collie dog,--a dog that fidgeted uneasily and paid scant heed
to the restraining hand and caressing voice of his mistress.

As the shabby man paused momentarily to scan the car's three
occupants, the girl happened to look toward him.  Her look was
brief and impersonal.  Yet, for the merest instant, her eyes
met his.  And their glances held each other with a momentary
intentness.  Then the girl turned again toward the restless
dog, seeking to quiet him.  And the man passed on.


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