He broke off and added, with a tinge of anxiety: 

“You say you happened to be walking near here.  Are you a neighbor of ours?”

“Not yet,” answered Gavin, with almost exaggerated simplicity.  “But I was hoping to be.  You see I was out looking for a job in this neighborhood.”

“A job?” repeated Milo, then, suspiciously:  “Why in this neighborhood, rather than any other?  You say you were at Miami—­”

“Because this chanced to be the neighborhood I was wandering in,” replied Gavin.  “As I explained to Miss Standish, I’d rather do some kind of outdoor work.  Preferably farm work.  That’s why I left Miami.  There seemed to be lots of farms and groves, hereabouts.”

“Yet you were on your way back toward Miami, when Bobby overtook you?  Rather a long walk, for—­”

“A long walk,” gravely agreed Brice.  “But safer sleeping quarters when one gets there.  Up North, one can take a chance, and sleep in the open, almost anywhere except on a yellow-jacket’s nest.  Down here, I’ve heard, rattlesnakes are apt to stray in upon one’s slumbers.  Out in the country, at least.  There aren’t any rattlesnakes in the Royal Palm’s gardens.  Besides, there’s music, and there’s the fragrance of night jasmine.  Altogether, it’s worth the difference of ten or twelve miles of tramping.”

“You’re staying at the Royal Palm, then?”

“Near it,” corrected Brice.  “To be exact, in the darkest corner of its big gardens.  The turf is soft and springy.  The solitude is perfect, too—­unless some nightwatchman gets too vigilant.”

He spoke lightly, even airily, through his pain and weakness.  But, as before, his every faculty was on guard.  A born and trained expert in reading human nature, he felt this giant somehow suspected him and was trying to trap him in an inaccuracy.  Wherefore, he fenced, verbally, calmly confident he could outpoint his clumsier antagonist.

“You don’t look like the kind of man who need sleep out of doors,” replied Standish, speaking slowly, as one who chooses his every word with care, and with his cold blue eyes unobtrusively scanning Gavin’s battered face.  “That’s the bedroom for bums.  You aren’t a bum.  Even if your manner, and the way you fought out yonder, didn’t prove that.  A bum doesn’t walk all this way and back, on a hot day, unless for a handout.  And you—­”

“But a handout is just what I asked for,” Gavin caught him up.  “When I brought Bobby Burns back I traded on the trifling little service by asking Miss Standish if I could get a job here.  It was impertinent of me, I know.  And I was sorry as soon as I’d done it.  But she told me, in effect, that you were ‘firing, not hiring.’  So I—­”

“Why did you want a job with me?” insisted Standish.  “Rather than with any of a dozen farmers or country house people along here?”

And, this time, any fool could have read the stark suspicion in his tone and in the hard blue eyes.