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the sleepy fishing village. Janson had died during the first World War, and the estate had been tied up in litigation for many years. At the time of the Florida boom there were plans to subdivide and sell off the Janson lands, but the boom collapsed before any action wastaken. Since then any attempt to buy any Janson land had been met with stony indifferent silence.
    “They still won’t sell any off, Judge?”
    He snorted with ancient fury. “Got all the money in the world. Don’t want more. Don’t give a damn the town is strangled. Can’t grow except to the east into the piny woods. Nobody’s going to come in here with big money and put up the kind of stuff that’ll bring the tourists and make the town grow, not with that little bitty piece of Gulf front that’s the only part them Jansons didn’t buy.”
    “Are you mayor now, Judge?”
    “Lord, boy, it’s been a mighty long time since I was mayor. Or anything else. I was on the County Commissioners a while, but it like to kill me running over to all those meetings in Davis all the time. Seventy-one-mile round trip to argue about if we should buy a two-bit record book. I couldn’t get no place political after Spence Larkin died. You know we were close, and just about anything he wanted to happen in this town, it happened. Anybody try to cross Spence and they’d find out he picked up their paper from the bank and he’d start in a-squeezing on them.”
    “When did he die, Judge?”
    “Let me look back now a minute. Yes, that was in nineteen and fifty. Seems he had a gut pain he didn’t pay enough attention to, and he finally went up to Tampa and they checked him over and said they wanted to operate. So he come back and he was busy as hell selling stuff and getting all his business stuff straightened away. And he went back up there and they operated and he up and died the next day. There was me and one or two others and his family that felt sorry about it, but the rest of the town went around sort of trying to hide a big grin. He was a man didn’t give a damn for making himself popular.”
    “Did Jenna get down for the funeral?”
    “Lordy, no. They never knew how to get hold of her fast. But she found out somehow and she was down here about two weeks later, storming around. Come in a great big car along with some funny-looking people. She’d done her hair red and she wore the tightest pants ever seen around here, son. Didn’t even stay over the night. Just found out from her folks that the will said she was to get one dollar, so damn if she didn’t go over there across the street to Wilson Willing’s office and collect the dollar and take off. Buddy Larkin didn’t make the funeral either. He was off there in Korea running up and down them hills with the marines. The only family here was Betty and her ma. Betty was seventeen then, thereabouts. Well, sir, old Angel Cobey, he was running the boat yard for the heirs, and when Buddy came back home it didn’t take him long to find out Angel was stealing the family blind. Buddy brought a marine pal of his back, name of Johnny Geer. So they pitched in and they did fair with it, but they didn’t begin to do real good until about fifty-four when Betty come home from college in Gainesville and pitched in too. Buddy is good on the mechanical end, but it’s Betty’s got more the head for business like Spence had. Of course their ma, Lila, she’s got no more head for business than a water turkey. Spence had left the business awful run down. He wasn’t interested in it. Now, Lordy, they get boats in there from all the way from Tarpon Springs to Marathon, boats where people want the work done right and done reasonable. They turned it into a corporation so Johnny Geer could get a piece of it, and they wrote Jenna to see if she wanted in and she said she didn’t want no gifts.”
    “Judge, I’m a little confused on this thing. What for would they want to run that boat yard? After what Mr. Larkin must have