For Sale —American Paradise by Willie Drye

Ashley had simply melted through the wire. Baker took off in the direction that he thought Ashley would have gone, but there was no trace of him.
    Sheriff George Baker told the Daily Tropical Sun of West Palm Beach that he thought the conversation between father and son about supper was a prear-ranged signal. His father’s suggestion that John have pork chops for supper was a signal that it was time for him to break out of jail.
    â€œIt is supposed that a skiff or canoe with weapons and provisions had been furnished by his friends and put in some place known only to them and him so that he knew where to go and by this time is a long ways out in the Glades,” the Tropical Sun concluded.
    John Ashley stayed out of sight for a couple of months after his escape. But in February 1915, with winter tourists and money coming into Florida, the clan came out of hiding.
    In 1894, the Florida East Coast Railway built a railroad drawbridge across the St. Lucie River, just north of Stuart. Eventually, seagulls learned that when a passenger train crossed the bridge, there was a good chance that food scraps would be thrown out of the dining car.
    Soon Stuart residents could tell when a passenger train was approaching because gulls would alight on the bridge to await the train. They would be on the bridge long before the train’s whistle was heard. Residents noted that they never assembled on the bridge in advance of freight trains.
    Shortly after sundown on Sunday, February 7, 1915, the gulls settled on the bridge in anticipation of the arrival of a southbound trainload of tourists on the Palm Beach Limited . It was the peak of the winter season, and the luxurious Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway train, nicknamed “The Millionaires’ Special,” was hauling a load of well-heeled northern visitors—many of them New Yorkers—to Palm Beach. The train included an observation car with an open-air platform, where passengers could watch the tropical vista slide by.
    Steam-powered locomotives were required to make regular stops to take on water for their boilers, and the Palm Beach Limited stopped at a water tank in Stuart. As the train started pulling away from the tank, but before it could pick up speed, four agile young men wearing masks dashed out of hiding and climbed onto the observation platform. They pulled out pistols and told the passengers to raise their hands.
    Some of the women screamed at the sight of the guns, but one of the would-be robbers shouted that they did not want anything from the women. One of the men herded the women into another passenger car.
    The bandits started to demand valuables from the men, but someone pulled the emergency stop cord, and the train screeched to a sudden halt. The bandits leapt off the train and ran.
    For all of their gun- waving, they hadn’t made much of an impression on the Yankee tourists.
    â€œThey were young fellows, and they looked like farmers,” Margaret Wilson, a passenger from New York City, told the New York Times . “They seemed frightened.”
    Still, an armed holdup of a passenger train full of wealthy tourists made national headlines. “Bandits Lose Nerve and Run from Prey,” read a front- page headline in the Washington Herald edition of Monday, February 8, 1915.
    A sheriff’s posse mounted a vigorous effort to capture the would- be train robbers, and soon had four suspects in custody in Stuart. But the men turned out to be drifters who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they were released.
    With the release of the tramps, however, suspicion automatically turned to the Ashleys, and Sheriff Baker and his posse were determined to find them. They continued beating the bushes through the night and into the next morning. This set the stage for an ironic comedy of errors that could have had a tragic ending, but luckily led only to embarrassment.
    It so happened that silent film director George Terwilliger was