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. As indeed it did.
For the words of Themar had done cruel work. Torn by black suspicion, Ronador saw no peace in this tranquil Florida world of sun and flower, of warm south wind and bright-winged bird. He saw only the buzzards, birds of evil omen. Swayed by fiery gusts of passion, of remorse, of sullenness and jealousy, he rode on, a prey to sinister resolution. To confront Diane with his knowledge of those days by the river, this resolution alternated as frequently with another--to put his fate to the test and passionately avow his utter trust in one immeasurably above the rank and file of women. He had racked Themar with insistent questions, he had quarreled again and again with the Baron since that night by the pool, until now he had at his finger-ends, the ways and days of Philip Poynter since the day the Baron had dispatched his young secretary upon the ill-fated errand to Diane. And as there were finer moments when his faith in the girl was unmarred by suspicion, so there were wild, unscrupulous hours of jealousy when he could have killed Philip and taunted her with insults.
Driving steadily, he came in course of time to a narrow, grass-banked creek. The nomads on the winding road beside it were many and beautiful. Here were yellow butterflies, sandpipers and kingfishers, and now and then an eagle cleaved the dazzling blue overhead with magnificent wing-strokes. Sand hills reflected the white sunlight. Beyond glistened a stretch of open sea with a flock of beautiful gannets of black and white whipping its surface. But Ronador did not thrill to the peaceful picture. He glanced instead at the buzzard which seemed curiously to hang above the long black car.