Black Caesar's Clan : A Florida Mystery Story

From the opening

Overhead sang the steady trade wind, tempering the golden sunshine's heat. To eastward, under an incredibly blue sky, stretched the more incredibly multi-hued waters of Biscayne Bay, the snow-white wonder-city of Miami dreaming on its shores.

Dividing the residence and business part of the city from the giant hotels, Flagler Avenue split the mass of buildings, from back-country to bay. To its westward side spread the shaded expanse of Royal Palm Park, with its deep-shaded short lane of Australian pines, its rustling palm trees, its white church and its frond-flecked vistas of grass.

Here, scarce a quarter-century ago, a sandspit had broiled beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-grass had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful White City had sprung up.

It was Sunday morning. From the park's bandstand, William J. Bryan was preaching to his open-air Sunday School class of tourists, two thousand strong. Around the bandstand the audience stood or sat in rapt interest.

The Australian-pine lane, to the rear, was lined with all manner of automobiles, from limousine to battered flivver. The cars' occupants listened as best they could--through the whirr of sea-planes and the soft hum of Sabbath traffic and the dry slither of a myriad grating palm-fronds in the trade-wind's wake--to the preacher's words.

The space of shaded grass, between lane and hotel-grounds and bandstand, was starred by white-clad children, and by men who sprawled drowsily upon the springy turf, their straw hats tilted above their eyes. The time was mid-February. The thermometers on the Royal Palm veranda registered seventy-three. No rain had fallen in weeks to mar the weather's perfection.

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