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Show 64, Jeffries, Islamorada [Section 2] "Jewfish Creek," the Old Timer said. "Now I want you to understand about a surveyed route for the railroad, and a very different time of it would have been for the Keys; you see a first plan was, they were gonna run the single track down through the Everglades, due west there across Old Fort Pointsett, Cape Sable, out into Florida Bay, a straight shot for Key West, a giant's causeway, the water-route for the New York-to-Florida Special, and a web-footed job it was, I assure you, simply building the railroad the way we did." Five miles up Key Largo, filament and webbed-silver, the new Card Sound bridge to the mainland shimmered and seemed to move in the heat. Dory and the old man were motoring slowly up State Route 905, and the railroad man continued, "Caesar's Creek. Black Caesar was a pirate in the crew of Edward Teach. The black man kept a harem up there on Old Rhoades Key. He was hung in Williamsburg, Virginia, early 1700s. Teach, Blackbeard, perished in combat with a British man-o-war." Hot green islands sit west of the Gulf Stream. "Can you make out how they lie, northeast, there, Old Rhoades, Elliot, Soldier Key and sequential to Kayo Biscayno? Likely nobody on those islands, now, but maybe around the prohibition you'd encounter bootleggers, slots, smugglers, or a boatload of Chinamen." |