Chapter 4

"This," said Payne, "is where the Paradise Gardens Colony should be by all maps and reports."

"But it isn't," said Higgins. "It's where some gazaboo with a pot of money and a taste for oriental effects camps out. I'm wondering if there is such a thing as that much advertised colony."

"I'm going to find out."

"Look out! There comes a ferocious animal to chew you up!"

A white poodle of tiny size with a bark like a piping bird came bobbing out of the house.

"Here, Nero!" called Higgins.

And then the dark slender woman who had been on the Egret stepped out from behind a palm.

"Flossy!" she said with a stamp of the foot, which twinkled the pendants in her ears. "She won't bite you."

"I was worrying," said Roger.

"Ramos!" called the woman. "There are some strange men here. Come, Flossy."

Payne found himself facing a tall dark man, with a hook nose, rings in his ears and a stringy mustache. The man placed himself full in the path leading to the little lake, and lazily, insolently studied the intruding pair.

"You wish to see some one?" he drawled.

"You, greaser!" blurted Higgins in anger. "Hanged if I've seen such a sassy half-breed since I left Mexico."

The man's lazy-lidded eyes narrowed to a slit. He came forward.

"Unless you are known you had better go elsewhere," he murmured.

"Really?" said Payne.

"Don't bother to be polite to him," growled Higgins. "Can't you see he's a greaser? Get out of the way, _hombre_; we want to talk to some one with brains."

Payne caught the engineer by the shoulder and held him back.

"We just want directions for getting up to the headwaters," he said.

"I still repeat: unless you are known, you had better go elsewhere."

"That's what we want to do. We're going up to the headwaters. This place happens to be on our way."

"You are not known here?"

"No."

"Then go back." The Mexican pointed toward the path whence they had come.

"Go back where you came from--and quickly."

"No," said Payne slowly, "that doesn't suit our program. We're going that way." He pointed across the clearing toward the blue water of the lake.

"Call your boss, greaser," snapped Higgins. "Let's talk to him." He raised his voice to a shrieking falsetto. "Help, help!"

Payne looked toward the boat landing instinctively.

The girl of the dawn on Gumbo Key was coming toward them, laughing; and the trees and the vine flowers and the sun all seemed to laugh with her.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" she said. "And the red-haired man, too!"

"Auburn!" protested Higgins, baring his fiery poll. "The best barbers of the West have told me it's auburn."

Ramos bowed deferentially.

"You know these men, miss?"

The girl and Payne looked at one another a long while. At last she turned resolutely to Ramos.

"Yes; I know them."

"My orders----"

"That's all right, Ramos, I know them."

"Perhaps you will tell me who they are?"

"Perhaps."

"Ah! Yes. Perhaps. Mrs. Livingstone called me. She did not know these men."

"I do. And I scarcely know you at all, Ramos. What are you; what is your job round here?"

"Caretaker, miss. Especially--when Mr. Garman is away."

"Annette!" It was the older woman again.

"Aunty," the girl whirling about resolutely, "I want to know a lot of things; why is there said to be a colony here when there is only Mr. Garman's winter home? Why is there all this mystery round here? Why does Ramos prowl round like a watchdog?"

"Come in the house, dear. Leave Ramos to deal with the strangers."

"Why don't you answer me, aunty?"

"You foolish child!"

"I'm not a child." The red was burning in the girl's creamy cheeks. "I won't be treated as a child. I want to know."

"Please, Annette, do not discuss your affairs before strangers."

"Strangers! Why, aunty, it's you who are strange to me. I can't understand you. It's all strange. My father letting me come here alone before he comes--he's strange, too, lately."

"I suppose Mr. Garman is strange to you too?"

A flush spread over the girl's face and she appeared to shrink and wilt; and in the swift glance she cast at Payne there seemed an appeal for help.

Payne spoke swiftly.

"We are truly sorry to intrude. We blundered in here on our way to the head of the river. If we can get directions we will be on our way at once."

The girl looked from her aunt to Ramos and then to Payne, and her chin went up.

"Come," she said, and led the way to the boathouse on the lake shore. "Oh, Willy Tiger!"

As mild and stoical a Seminole Indian as ever belied his surname responded to her call. He smiled at the sight of her, an appalling feat for a Seminole; and the smile confessed he was her abject slave.

"Willy, you will do a favor for me, won't you? I want you to take these two friends of mine up to the head of the river, wherever that is. My friends. For me, Willy."

The Seminole silently disappeared and returned paddling a long dugout into which he tossed his rifle and a bundle containing his camping outfit.

"My name's Roger Payne," said Roger, preparing to follow Higgins into the boat. "I am under obligations, Miss----"

She did not respond to his suggestive pause.

"I don't think I'll tell you my name--now," she said thoughtfully. "Perhaps--after you've seen the land you purchased from Senator Fairclothe. Perhaps--not. Good-by."

Roger looked at Ramos, watching them from a distance, and replied:

"So long."

X

Higgins sat facing the silent Seminole, who swiftly paddled the long dugout out of the little lake before the house and into a sluggish creek running into it from the northeast. The Indian wore the mauve-tinted, gaudily embroidered dress shirt of his tribe, but as a concession to civilization he had donned a pair of overalls so much too large for him that the belt was high round his strapping chest.

"What name did she call you by, Willy?" asked the engineer.

"Me Willy Tiger."

"Tiger doesn't fit you, Willy."

Higgins dipped his hand overboard and sprinkled water on the Indian's head.

"I hereby christen you Willy High Pockets. And may they never be empty."

An awful contortion took place upon the Seminole's mahogany features. He was trying to grin.

"You give good Seminole why-o-me," he said, ceasing his paddling to rub his stomach. "Willy Tiger----"

"High Pockets!"

"Willy High Pock' sick. Why-o-me make strong."

"So that's how they miscall hooch down in this country," ruminated Higgins. "No, Willy; we don't pack any liquor. Shall I give him a piece of plug?"

"Suit yourself--if you've got any."

"Got any? Never go into an Indian country without it."

Higgins produced from his bag a slab of plug tobacco which made Willy's mouth water.

"Willy," said Payne suddenly, "who is Mr. Garman?"

"Donno."

"Put your tobacco away, Higgins."

"Garman big boss," said the Indian swiftly. "_Esoka-bonus-che_-tobacco. You give."

"Boss of what?"

Without taking his eyes from the plug Willy's right arm described an eloquent arc embracing the earth, the water, the sky, about them.

"Big boss--all country! Good tobacco. Strong----"

"Boss of the whole country, eh? What business is he in?"

"Donno."

"Where is he now?"

"Donno."

"What makes him boss of this country?"

"Donno."

"And there you are," laughed Higgins. "Willy looks different from a regular Indian; but they're all alike. He loosened up to get this piece of plug; now he 'dunno' anything."

"Donno," repeated Willy monotonously.

As the dugout scraped and stuck on the bottom the Indian doffed his overalls and displayed the full gorgeousness of the Seminole dress shirt. Payne wondered how in the souls of these swamp dwellers there had developed a taste for a hue as delicate as the pink of the flamingo. Bands of red, yellow, scarlet, mauve and black were embroidered upon the cloth, and upon the shoulders were scarlet tufts resembling epaulets. Willy stepped overboard, barefooted and nude save for his rolled up shirt, and began to shove. A three-foot water moccasin lay coiled on a mud bank in his path and the Indian's bare foot flung it aside as one might kick away a stick. Presently he paused, deep in liquid mud to his thighs, his feet working on something below.

"_Alpate_," he said. "'Gator."

A commotion followed in the mud; a dark knob appeared above water. There was a thrashing and upheaval and the Indian threw a half-grown alligator upon the bank and dispatched it with a blow from his camp ax.

A few rods farther on the canoe was over the shallows and floating easily in a flooded jungle of saw grass which stretched away as far as the eye could reach.

"What's this?" demanded Payne.

"_Oko_ make river end."

"What?"

"_Oko_--lake. River end here. We there."

Payne drew out his maps and studied them.

"Where's Deer Hammock?"

"_Echu_ Hammock there." The Indian pointed to a cluster of palmettos that reared its tops above the saw grass to the north.

"Go there."

They shoved their way through the grass; and as he contemplated the drowned land all round Payne grew warm and then cold with anger. Mile after mile to the east, north and south the watery waste stretched. Here and there a hammock bearing a few trees stood out, like tiny islands in a vast sea. Save for this there was only the uninhabited desolation of the water and grass; and the brilliant sky above.

There was no word spoken as they pushed toward the hammock. Higgins had noted the change on Payne's countenance and saw it was no time for careless words. Payne drove his pole into the bottom and drew it out for inspection.

"Limestone bottom; a thin scum of muck on top of it; and water."

The saw grass grew thicker. Only a water trail worn by dugouts permitted them to go through. Higgins probed the bottom.

"About six inches of muck here," he reported, "and a foot of water on it."

The water grew shallow on both sides of the channel and the grass more dense. The Indian rose to his toes and peered above the grass tops as they neared the hammock.

"_Echu_!" he said presently, reaching for his rifle. "Deer _ojus_ on hammock."

Silently the dugout crept toward the high ground, the Indian parting the saw grass to peer ahead. They were fifty yards from it when Willy began to fire and at the third shot a tiny buck leaped up and crashed down in the palmetto scrub, where it had fancied itself concealed.

It was near the end of the day now and the phenomena of the tropical sunset served to add to the desolation of the scene. Tiny clouds rode in the sky, multicolored from the sun, for all the world as if painted upon the blue above. The west was livid with scarlet and orange flame, and on the hammock the tops of the trees were rosy in the sunset.

Higgins and Payne set to work to dress the deer while Willy proceeded to build a Seminole camp. On the highest ground of the hammock he dug a fire hole, and radiating from it like spokes from the hub of a wheel he dug three small ditches. With his ax he swiftly constructed three sleeping benches of branches, building them close to the central fire hole. Then he built his main fire of short logs in the fire hole. In each of the little ditches he threw long logs, their ends in the fire.

Payne and Higgins watched him, expertly appreciative of his novel woodcraft.

"It was a shame to take this country away from his kind," said Higgins. "They know how to live in it--and like it."

Payne nodded. He was looking back over the watery waste through which they had come.

"You got your tract located?" asked Higgins.

Payne pointed out over the saw grass waving above the drowned land on the southern side of the hammock.

"That's it."

XI

"We'll look her over in the morning."

Higgins lay stretched comfortably upon his sleeping bench, and between puffs of a campfire pipe, strove to be consoling. On another bench Willy High Pockets, having gorged himself beyond human capacity on boiled venison, lay staring at the camp fire, open-eyed but in a stupor of complete contentment. Payne occupied the third bench. He lay flat on his back, staring upward through the palmetto branches at the soft stars which were appearing in the magic purple velvet of the Southern night.

In the center, the large fire hole was filled with red, smoldering embers. Radiating from it flames licked along the logs in the three shallow ditches which trisected the camp site, and as the central fire burned down the ends of the long logs were pushed into it and new fuel supplied. The heat from the fires spread along the ground beneath the slightly raised sleeping benches, smothering or drying up such dampness as might otherwise rise from the earth after sunset. Distributed as the heat was, it formed a barrier which shut out miasmatic fogs from creeping over the high ground from the swamp. It was the Seminole system by which these Indians had survived in their unhealthy environment.

"She may not look so bad when we go over her carefully," added Higgins.

"Thanks," said Payne. "Optimism is good medicine to sleep on. I'm stung, of course. The Prairie Highlands Company sold this stuff to me as virgin prairie sod ready for the plow. I discounted that by fifty per cent, considering the low price. I knew enough about this land to know, in spite of lying maps, faked soil reports and photographs, that there would be some water here. I hired you because I was prepared for a drainage proposition. But I didn't think they were crooked and nervy enough to sell me a lake--that senator writing letters on his official stationery."

"Maybe you've got on the wrong tract?"

"You know better; you went over the maps yourself. No; they've got the crust to show this hammock in their photographs; I recognized it at once. They showed it with fat, black grassland stretching away on every side of it. They've got photographs of a town that should be located here, and of roads and ditches and farms. Their crop exhibit--crops from Prairie Highlands--is a wonder: Corn, sugar cane, potatoes, grass. Fifty per cent I discounted it; one hundred per cent would have been right."

"They got soil experts to write reports on it," growled Higgins. "Or at least, to sign them. Those are pretty big names on your papers, men with big reputations. How could they do it?"

"They haven't been in here," said Payne bitterly. "The thing is beginning to get a little clear. Nobody's been in here who wasn't wanted. It's simple to keep them out, with the river the only trail to come in by; so they've built up a fiction about the district, and nobody's been here to check up on it--until now."

"Wonder how they got those soil men to put their names on the reports?"

"Senator Fairclothe, I suppose. You can get men from Washington who can't be got any other way. What I'm wondering about is who's big enough to get him."

"What!"

"Did you ever know of a politician with a big name who was ever anything but a figurehead in a deal of this sort?"

"I guess you're right."

"It's the name and the reputation and the man's official standing that's valuable. Senator Fairclothe may be crooked--I don't say he is; but he isn't a fool politically, at least. No man gets a stranglehold on his state and an inside standing in Washington and keeps it year after year as he has done without being some shrewd as a politician. It's a one-hundred-to-one bet that he's never seen this lake that his company is selling as farms. He might be willing to do something as crooked as that, but he wouldn't be so foolish. Understand?

"It would be taking too big a risk. He'd be afraid that his political opponents would get next. If they did, they'd get some swindled buyer to start action against him, just before an election. My guess is that Fairclothe doesn't know a thing about what this tract is. He's been got by somebody, as the soil experts were got; and I'm wondering who it is that's big enough to get him. It must be somebody pretty big; but whoever it is, that's the gang or the man I'm going to talk business with."

"Make 'em cough up your money, eh? They'll probably do it--to keep your mouth shut."

"They can't keep my mouth shut now."

"Nor mine. It's too rotten, too--rotten."

"You're right, Hig. And I don't know whether I want to just take my money back and clear out--even if they'd offer it to me."

"Well"--Higgins' chuckle came forth sleepily--"it might be made something of at that.--Alligators? No. Fish? No. There's the water buffalo. That's never been tried down here. Hah! I see a fortune in it. 'Buy a wonderful Water Buffalo Ranch and Get Rich Quick. He Lives on Water. Have We Got Lots of it? Ask Us!'--How does that hit you for advertising matter?--Form a stock corporation; get a picture of a Philippine buffalo; and sell stock for all the money a sucker's got. Of course there aren't any water buffalos here; but neither is there any land; and that doesn't keep them from selling it just the same."

"There is land here--under the water."

"Yes. Pretty good, too--under the water."

"Water can be drained off."

"Sure. But--well, we'll look her over in the morning, Payne. Hey, Willy High Pockets! Touch up that fire a little."

But Willy High Pockets was snoring. Higgins rolled out, replenished the fire and soon followed the Indian's example.

Payne did not go to sleep for a long time. It was not the sensuously whispering night with its mistlike darkness and near-by stars that kept him awake. Nor was it the splash of an otter, of minks and the sounds of other animals of the darkness. The deep eyes of the girl of the morning were the lights that he saw as he lay staring up at the palmetto tops; and what sent his blood racing too swiftly for sleep was the memory of her flushed face and tossing hair as she had defied her aunt and Ramos in order to help two men whom she had seen for only a few minutes before.

Payne had roamed much and had never had any thought or feelings for a new country save as a scene for his activity, for achievement. He had never loved. As he lay on his rude couch under the open sky and realized how mistaken was his investment he wondered why he did not feel unduly depressed or disturbed. He had made a poor business deal, and good business sense dictated that he should try to get out of it with as little loss as possible and get into something new. The spirit of business adventure in him, which constantly urged him to seek new fields for his ventures, had led him to make mistakes ere this.

He had never wasted time upon his errors, either in deploring them or in deceiving himself that he could turn them to advantage, but had promptly put them behind him, credited something to experience, and started anew upon the road of achievement. This was what he should do now. Better to lose his investment than waste his time upon a doubtful if not hopeless proposition. But when he recalled the unanswered questions which the girl had directed at her aunt, he knew that in this instance he was not going to do anything of the sort. Having accepted this as a fact he closed his eyes to the soft, intimate stars above the palmettos and went to sleep.

In the morning, when the water and grass were still vivid with the reflection of the multi-colored dawn, Payne and Higgins were out in Willy High Pockets' canoe, cruising the thousand acres Payne had bought. The piece lay mainly to the southwest of Deer Hammock.

"That hammock is the northeast corner post of the Prairie Highlands Company's land," said Payne, studying his map. "I got the corner thousand in a square chunk. Do you see a pine wood, Higgins?"

"There's something down there, straight west of the hammock that might be it."

Payne swept a westward line with his glasses and nodded. "Looks like it. A pine island, I suppose. Now the southern line runs to a growth of cypress, two of immense size. I can pick them out too. We'll go down the south line first."

Halfway toward the cypress trees the dugout grounded hopelessly, and they left it and waded through six inches of water the remainder of the distance.

"They're honest about their marks at least," said Payne when they had reached the trees. "But they didn't say anything about the cypress being in an unholy swamp."

"Holy smoked fish, what a country!" muttered Higgins as he peered into the dark recesses of the densely wooded swamp. "What a place to hide out in if a fellow wanted to drop out of the world. Say, I guess this is the same swamp our friend Davis went paddling into yesterday. Well, she lies lower than your lake, notice that?"

"So it does. I thought I had the lowest land in the world, but this swamp's got mine beat."

"A ditch in the swamp running into the river might drain your piece some. Have to be some dig, but you could afford to do it on a thousand-acre proposition. It's something to figure on."

Payne made no reply but led the way to the dugout and headed across the water for the bunch of pines marking his northwestern corner.

"There isn't as much water on it as I thought," he said as the canoe stuck again as they approached the pines.

"No; it's only the middle that's really drowned. Wonder what the bottom's like."

Higgins thrust his paddle tentatively into the bottom. "Well, I'll be damned!" The blade of the paddle had slipped easily into the ground. Higgins pushed on the handle, pushed the paddle three feet into soil, withdrew it and held it up for inspection. "Muck! Three foot of black muck, and I wasn't near touching bottom!"

Together they began to probe, and everywhere with the same result. The muck underneath the water ran from three to five feet in depth, and was as black as peat.

The water grew shallower as they went westward and presently gave way to dry land covered with a growth of saw grass through which they literally had to push their way. The saw grass ended abruptly, and the last hundred yards to the pines they walked on high and dry land. The pines were on the eastern edge of the great prairie which they had glimpsed on their walk up the river.

As they paddled back to the hammock for the breakfast which they had left the Seminole to prepare Payne studied the land to the northward with keen interest. A heavier growth than saw grass covered this land. On closer inspection it proved to be a jungle of elderberry, the growth so dense that a man could barely squeeze through. The land here was higher and dry, and black muck of the same depth as on the drowned land to the south. Payne paddled back to Deer Hammock in silence. Just as they were about to land he drove his paddle into the bottom with a gesture of finality.

"Well, Higgins?"

"Yes, sir! That high ground to the north is a watershed and it all drains off onto your land. That's what drowns it."

"Right. And I drain into that river."

"Yep. You can drain your piece all right. But it'll cost like sin; and that high elderberry ground up there will always be shedding water onto it."

"So all I need is to get hold of that piece up there."

"Hah! So that's what you were thinking about? Who owns it?"

"Not this crooked Prairie Company. It's owned by the Southern Cypress Company. They own so much land they probably don't know what they've got over here. We'll get breakfast and hustle back to a wire some place. I'll think it over. I may buy that piece. Then we'll have something to do business with."

"Well, you'd better hurry or your breakfast will be gone," spoke a voice from the hammock. "Willy Tiger had it all ready when we arrived."

Payne stepped from the canoe and strode toward the two men who were seated at the camp fire. One of them rose and he recognized the dark face of Ramos. Then he saw Willy Tiger's crumpled body lying like a sack of grain across one of the sleeping benches.

Payne looked at the man who had spoken, who remained seated. He looked at him steadily for a long while. Then he said: "My name is Payne. I guess you're Mr. Garman."

XII

"You're right."