anxious to give pleasure. Only the sternest prudence and
an unconquerable awe of uniform had kept him from tossing bills to the
various traffic policemen who had seemed to smile upon his hurry.

No through train left for hours; but after the first disappointment of
momentary check, he decided that he was more pleased than otherwise.
It would save embarrassment. He was going South, where his color would
be more considered than his reputation, and on the little local he
chose there was a "Jim Crow" car--one, that is, specially set aside
for those of his race. That it proved crowded and full of smoke did
not trouble him at all, nor did the admiring pleasantries which the
splendor of his apparel immediately called forth. No one knew him;
indeed, he was naturally enough mistaken for a prosperous gambler, a
not unflattering supposition. In the yard, after the train pulled out,
he saw his private car under a glaring arc light, and grinned to see
it left behind.

He spent the night pleasantly in a noisy game of high-low-jack, and
the next morning slept more soundly than he had slept for weeks,
hunched upon a wooden bench in the boxlike station of a North Carolina
junction. The express would have brought him to Jacksonville in
twenty-four hours; the journey, as he took it, boarding any local that
happened to be going south, and leaving it for meals or sometimes for
sleep or often as the whim possessed him, filled five happy days.
There he took a night train, and dozed from Jacksonville until a
little north of New Smyrna.

He awoke to find it broad daylight, and the car half empty. The train
was on a siding, with news of a freight wreck ahead. Gideon stretched
himself, and looked out of the window, and emotion seized him. For all
his journey the South had seemed to welcome him, but here at last was
the country he knew. He went out upon the platform and threw back his
head, sniffing the soft breeze, heavy with the mysterious thrill of
unplowed acres, the wondrous existence of primordial jungle, where
life has rioted unceasingly above unceasing decay. It was dry with the
fine dust of waste places, and wet with the warm mists of slumbering
swamps; it seemed to Gideon to tremble with the songs of birds, the
dry murmur of palm leaves, and the almost inaudible whisper of the
gray moss that festooned the live-oaks.

"Um-m-m," he murmured, apostrophizing it, "yo' 's the right kind o'
breeze, yo' is. Yo'-all's healthy." Still sniffing