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It was a world as garish and unreally lovely as a painted scene. Late afternoon on the Florida coast — still waters, lacquered with sunshine ; hunchback trees trailing unshaven, gray niossbeards over bright flame and orange fungus and boldly tinted blossoms. The stage was set for Romance, but actors there were none, except for the unkempt slovenliness of the tramp steamer misnomered Belle o' th' Isle, snuffing and wheezing along the shore. Then, suddenly, the grim actor, Tragedy, skulking in the wings, took his cue, and glided out on the serene stage — softly, slyly — as softly as yon rowboat, drifting irresolute in the warm hollows of the waves.
The captain of the Belle o' th' Isle caught sight of the boat from the lookout-bridge.
1 ' Hey ! Jem ! " he roared. ' ' There 's a boat adrift — looks queer to me. Stand by, lads — ahoy, there — ahoy ! ' '
No answer. Tragedy has few lines to speak. A moment later, the silence was explained. In the bottom of the boat, awash in the seepage like a sodden rag, sprawled an old man, ragged of hair and garments, barely breathing. The sailors hoisted him aboard the Bell o' th' Isle, where he fought feebly, with insane grimacing,
and fell into the deathlike doze of delirium.
"Old cove's going to snuff out lively, unless we git him ashore," agreed the awe-sobered crew. Accordingly, the tramp pointed her blunt nose, turtlewise, toward the white sand of a near-by landing-beach. A low bungalow fronted the beach, inhabited, apparently, by one lone, small boy, impatiently angling for crawfish in a stagnant pool by the wharf. He looked up in freckled, round-mouthed astonishment as the steamer snorted to a stop.
' ' Hey ! bub, 's there a doctor near here?"
The boy nodded, tongueless.
"Then we'll leave this old fellow here — found him adrift just now and nearly done for. Go call your mammy or dad, bub "
The boy flashed up the beach with agitated flutter of bare legs. "Vida — oh, YidaV he shouted. A tall girl, vivacious with a vitality not of the somnolent Southland, answered the call. She received the news as one who would deal with a blaze in a dynamite-house, an unexpected mouse and a sheeted, gibbering ghost in the same competent fashion. Vida Dudley was the power that pulled the strings
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