Honor of Thieves by Cutcliffe Hyne — Read

Now the great rambling, wooden hotel in which Miss Elsie Kildare was staying under care of her friends, the Van Liews, though on the end of a telegraph-wire, and within easy day's steam of a railroad, was not particularly far in crow's-flight from that uncharted river where the _Port Edes_ lay stranded on a sand-bar. The hotel, in fact, backed upon the Everglades, and faced the blue, crisping waters of the Mexican Gulf. At one side of it was a plantation of sisal hemp, and beyond that thickets of saw-grass, and beyond again cypress-trees and cabbage-palms sprouting from an undergrowth which was bound into an impenetrable _cheveux de frise_ with wait-a-bit thorn. At the other side were newly planted umbrella-trees, two decrepit orange-bushes without fruit, twenty luxuriant chumps of elephants' ears, and then straggles of palmetto-scrub right down to the soft white banks of Gulf sand.

Beyond was clear blue water, with a rickety wooden wharf straddling a mile out into it, like some uncouth, gray-legged centipede. And beneath the water, dented rusty food-cans grew intimate with the coral polyp.