CHAPTER XXXIII
BY THE WINDING CREEK
At dawn one morning a long black car shot out from Jacksonville and
took to the open road. It glided swiftly past arid stretches of pine
barrens streaked with stagnant water, past bogs aglow with iris,
through quaint little cities smiling under the shelter of primeval oaks
and on, stopping only long enough for the driver to ask a question of a
negro on a load of wood--or a mammy singing plaintively in the
flower-bright dooryard of a house.
Sometimes losing, sometimes finding, the trail of a green and white
van, the long black car shot on, through roads of pleasant windings
flanked by forest and river, beyond which lay the line of green-fringed
sand hills which parallel the rolling Atlantic. Past placid lakes
skimmed by purple martins, past orange groves heavy with fruit, past
fences overrun with Cherokee roses, and on, but the driver, abroad with
the sunrise glow, seemed somehow to see little or none of it.
Sometimes he stared sombrely at a ghostly palmetto, tall and dark
against the sky. Once with a grinding shudder of brakes he halted on
the border of a cypress swamp and stared frowningly at the dark, dank
trees knee-deep in stagnant water above which the buzzards flew, as if
the loathsome spot matched his mood.
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