When Milo Standish came back from Miami that noon he professed much loud-voiced joy at seeing his guest so well recovered from the night’s mishaps.  At lunch. he suggested: 

“I am running across to Roustabout Key this afternoon. in the launch.  It’s an island I bought a few years ago.  I keep a handful of men there to work a grapefruit grove and a mango orchard and some other stuff I’ve planted.  I go over to it every week or so.  Would you care to come along?”

He spoke with elaborate carelessness, and looked anywhere except at his guest.  Gavin, not appearing to note the concealed nervousness of his host’s voice and manner, gave eager consent.  And at two o’clock they set forth.

They drove in Milo’s car a half-mile or more to southwestward along the road which fronted the house.  Then turning into a sand byway which ran crookedly at right angles to it and which skirted the southern end of the mangrove-swamp, they headed for the sea.  Another half-mile brought them to a handkerchief-sized beach, much like that on the other side of the swamp. where Gavin had found the hidden path.  Here, on mangrove-wood piles, was a short pier with a boathouse at its far end.

“I keep my launch and my fishing-boats in there,” explained Milo. as he climbed out of the car.  “If it wasn’t for that pesky swamp.  I could have had this pier directly back of my house, and saved a lot of distance.”

“Why not cut a road through the swamp?” suggested Brice, following him along the pier.

Again Standish gave vent to that great laugh of his—­a laugh outwardly jovial, but as hollow as a shell.

“Young man,” said he. “if ever you try to cut your way through an East Coast mangrove-swamp you’ll find out just how silly that question is.  A swamp like that might as well be a quick-sand, for all the chance a mortal has of traveling through it.”

Gavin made no reply.  Again, he was visualizing the cleverly engineered path from the beach-edge to Milo’s lawn.  And he recalled Claire’s unspoken plea that he say nothing to Standish about his chance discovery of it.  He remembered, too, the night-song of the mocking bird from the direction of that path, and the advent of Rodney Hade from it.

Milo had unlocked the boat-house, and was at work over a fifteen-foot steel motorboat which was slung on chains above the water.  A winch and well-constructed pulleys-and-chains made simple the labor of launching it in so quiet a sea.

Out they fared into the gleaming sunlit waters of the bay.  Far to eastward gleamed the white city of Miami, and nearer, across the bay from it the emerald stretch of key with Cape Florida and the old Spanish Light on its southern point and the exquisite “golden house” of Mashta shining midway down its shoreline.  Miles to eastward gleamed the gray viaduct, the grain elevator outlines of the Flamingo rising yellow above a fire-blue sea.