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Show 67, Jeffries, Islamorada [Section 2] pipeline down to Key West, we fetched water on the train in 7,000 gallon cypress tanks, and we got four cents a gallon for it. Or later, when a tank truck sold water-four cents. "Kendall, Glades, Tavernier. . ." Rossmore said, "Pigeon Key, Cudjoe, whistlestops, is all they was. Night, son, locomotive breathing in front of the station house, can you picture it, nobody but three or four people on the island, and I'm just pullin on that train whistle for a full two minutes, till it gathered into a sound like from great pipe organs, filled the island, and I suppose moved out to sea." Frigate bird, man-o-war bird hung motionless 1,000 feet overhead. "He knows of a breeze up there, off the Gulf. It's a strange story," Rossmore said, "how the island due east of us in the Atlantic became the seat of Dade County." "What?" They were running between Upper and Lower Matecumbe: four bridges, two causeways, tiny Tea Table Key. "In the 1820's, Key West was on its way to becoming the richest city in the nation. Due to opportunities presented by the unlighted reefs of the Florida Keys. A young man named Jacob Housman got bored with a Long Island winter and headed his father's schooner south for the Barbados. He wrecked on a reef at Key West, |