An enormous sailfish—­dazzlingly metallic blue and silver—­ broke from the calm water just ahead, and whirled high in air, smiting the bay again with a splash that sounded like a gunshot.

“That fellow must have been close to seven feet long,” commented Milo as the two men watched the churned water where the fish had struck.  “He’s the kind you see when you aren’t trolling.  He’s after a school of ballyhoos or mossbunkers ....  There’s Roustabout Key just ahead,” he finished as their launch rounded an outcrop of rock and came in view of a mile-long wooded island a bare thousand yards off the weather bow.

A mangrove fringe covered the shoreline, two thirds of the way around the key.  At the eastern end was a strip of snowy beach backed by an irregular line of coconut palms, and with a very respectable dock in the foreground.  From the pier a wooden path led upward through the scattering double row of palms to a corrugated iron hut, with smaller huts and outbuildings half seen through the foliage-vistas beyond.

“I’ve some fairly good mango trees back yonder,” said Standish as he brought the launch alongside the dock’s wabbly float, “and grapefruit that is paying big dividends at last.  The mangoes won’t be ripe till June, of course.  But they’re sold already, to the last half-bushel of them.”

“‘Futures,’ eh?” suggested Gavin,

“‘Futures,’” assented Milo.  “And ‘futures’ in farming. are just about as certain as in Wall Street.  There’s a mighty gamble to this farm-game.”

“How long have—?” began Gavin, then stopped short and stared.

One or two negro laborers had drifted down toward the dock, as the boat warped in at the float.  Now, from the corrugated iron hut appeared a white man, who, at sight of the boat, broke into a limping run and was in time to catch the line which Milo flung at him.

The man was sparsely and sketchily clad.  At first. his tanned face seemed to be of several different colors and to have been modeled by some bungling caricaturist.  Yet, despite this eccentricity of aspect, something about the obsequiously hurrying man struck Brice as familiar.  And, all at once, he recognized him.

This was the big beach comber with whom Gavin had fought barely twenty-four hours earlier.  The man bore bruises and swellings a-plenty on his rugged features, where Brice’s whalebone blows had crashed.  And they had distorted his face almost past recognition.  He moved, too, with manifest discomfort, as if all his huge body were as sore as his visage.

“Hello, Roke!!” hailed Milo genially, then in amaze. “what in thunder have you been doing to yourself?  Been trying to stop the East Coast Flyer?  Or did you just get into an argument with one of the channel dredges?”

“Fell,” said Roke. succinctly, jerking his thumb back toward the corrugated iron hut.  “Climbed my roof to mend a leak.  Fell.  My face hit every bump.  Then I landed on a pile of coconuts.  I’m sore all over.  I—­”