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.

Moving with aimless slowness—­one is not long in Southern Florida without acquiring a leisurely gait the lounger left the park and strolled up Thirteenth Avenue, towards the bridge which spans the Miami River and forms a link between the more thickly settled part of the town and its southerly suburbs.

As he crossed the bridge, a car passed him, moving rapidly eastward, and leaving a choky trail of dust.  He had bare time to see it was driven by the Norse giant, and that the girl had moved to the front seat beside the driver.  The collie (fastened by a cord running through his collar from one side of the tonneau to the other) lay fidgetingly on the rear seat.

For miles the man plodded on, under the wind-tempered sunshine.  Passing Brickell Avenue and then the last of the city, he continued,—­now on the road, now going cross-country,—­until he came out on a patch of broken beach, with a background of jungle-like forest.

The sun had gone beyond the meridian mark during his ramble southward, and the afternoon was hurrying by.  For the way was long, though he had tramped steadily.

As he reached the bit of sandy foreshore, he paused for the first time since stopping to survey the car.  An unpainted rowboat was drawn up on the beach.  Half way between it and the tangle of woodland behind, was a man clad only in undershirt and dirty duck trousers.  He was yanking along by the scruff of the neck a protesting and evidently angry collie.

The man was big and rugged.  Weather and sea had bronzed him to the hue of an Arab.  Apparently, he had sighted the dog, and had run his boat ashore to capture the stray animal.  He handled his prize none too gently, and his management was calling forth all the collie’s resentment.  But as the man had had the wit to seize the dog by the scruff of the neck and to keep himself out of the reach of the luckless creature’s vainly snapping jaws, these protests went for nothing.

Within thirty feet of the boat, the dog braced himself for a new effort to tear free.  The man, in anger, planted a vigorous kick against the collie’s furry side.  As his foot was bare, the kick lost much of its potential power to injure.  Yet it had the effect of rousing to sudden indignation the dusty youth who had stopped on his tramp from Miami to watch the scene.

“Whose dog is that?” he demanded, striding forward, from the shade, and approaching the struggling pair.

“Who the blue blazes are you?” countered the barefoot man, his eyes running contemptuously over the shabby and slight-built figure.