Chapter 8

"Lie down! Right where you are." Payne's orders seemed to drop the blacks in their tracks. Relieved at having a white man think for them they stretched their great bodies in the grass, their eyes not on the menace of the hammock, but upon Payne. Payne and Higgins remained standing, their carbines lying across their left arms.

"If they can hit anything at that distance they've got to be pretty good shots, Hig."

"I'll say they have. Got to have pretty good tools, too; and most of the rifles I've seen round here are the old forty-fours."

"If they are Garman's men they'll have up-to-date rifles all right."

"Sure. The best money can buy." Higgins shrewdly estimated the range to the palms. "Say, Payne, if they've got Springfields or something as good, and can use them, we're making a fool play standing here."

"Lie down, there."

"Down hell! What I mean is we ought to get closer to 'em so we'd have an even break with these little 30-30s."

"Then we'd be off our land. They've got to come to us."

"I see. What in the devil are they waiting for? Put your glasses on those palms and see what you can see."

"Can't see a thing," reported Payne after a careful scrutiny of the hammock. "The palms shut out the sun and hide them."

"They knew what they were doing when they went there, didn't they?" said Higgins. "Nice, dark hiding place where they can lay safe and have their targets out in the sun. You can do what you please, Payne, but the first shot out of there I start for the hammock. There's a big bunch of palmetto scrub south of it. I'll get in there and give 'em hell-for-breakfast."

Payne was holding his glasses upon the palms. He had gotten the perfect focus now and saw that a broad wagon trail led through the middle of the hammock. Out of this opening presently came the three riders, riding abreast at a walk. Payne started. A hot flush of embarrassment flooded his face.

"Higgins; for heaven's sake, put down your gun. Put it down quick, I say! Hide it. Get up and go to work, men. Hustle. It's all right. Get a-going!"

He hid his rifle hurriedly, picked up a digger and set to work, grimly ignoring Higgins' frantic demands for an explanation. He was working furiously and the crew was following his example, when the three riders, who were Garman, Mrs. Livingstone and the girl, came cantering up to the fence line.

It was a different Garman than had faced Roger across the camp fire on Deer Hammock; and it was a different girl than had ridden away from Flower Prairie. Only Mrs. Livingstone seemed to be as Roger recalled her, cold, affected; arrogant, and extremely conscious of the importance of her position as chaperon.

Garman for the nonce was the courtier, the artistic idler, the dilettante in the art of luxurious living; and Payne, conscious of his dirt-smudged overalls, envied him the elegance with which he played the rôle. That Garman was interested in the crudities of business seemed an improbability; that he was connected with things dark and hidden, a thought to ridicule. His purpose in life just then was that of the luxurious idler, to escort two ladies of his class for a leisurely ride, to serve them gracefully as their chevalier. And yet, beneath the silken coat of manners the tiger force of him was evident. From where he stood Payne could feel the hypnotic power of the man's mere presence.

As he looked at the girl he saw that she too had felt it--saw that it was Garman's nearness that wrought the change in her. She seemed under an influence which subdued yet excited her as might some subtle drug. Her normally calm, frank eyes were heavy and mysterious with a drowsy languor. Her tall, vibrant figure likewise seemed to droop drowsily, the budding lines of her body tremulous with young life and womanhood. Her hands hung languidly upon the saddle horn. Only her rich young lips were firm and straight, as if her mind and will power were fighting resolutely against the desire to yield to the subtle influence which was steeping her through and through.

"Are you fencing off Flower Prairie--that garden of dreams come true?" she said with a careless laugh.

"Yes," said Payne, "but I'm going to put a gate in there."

"Kind of him, isn't it?" said Mrs. Livingstone, turning to Garman with the empty, affected laugh of her kind. "Shall we be permitted to continue our rides to Flower Prairie? Are persons permitted to place such obstructions in such places?"

Garman smoothed his tawny mustache, playfully bowing to her, as if loathe to interrupt with a reply.

Payne was breathing hard.

"Yes; they are," he said hoarsely, and checked himself.

"Ye-es," purred Garman. "If they own the land."

Payne turned on him.

"Where's Willy Tiger?" he snapped out. "What did you do to him?"

"Come, Annette," said Mrs. Livingstone. "It is too warm to stand still. We will ride back slowly."

"Aunty----" began the girl, and then, as Garman moved his horse toward her, she bowed her head and pulled her mount away from Garman's. "Very well, aunty," she said nervously, and there was relief in her bearing as she drew away from Garman.

This time, as she cantered away she looked back. And in her eyes was a look of appeal, and a promise that she would come again.

XX

"How about Willy High Pockets--or Tiger?" demanded Higgins the instant the ladies were out of hearing.

"Payne," said Garman, instantly dropping his air of affectation and becoming the business man, "you've made a mistake in picking a chief assistant with red hair. Damn it, man, don't you know it's a sign of hot-headedness. Keep 'em down--foremen, crew handlers, perhaps; but as executives, never!"

The veins were swelling in Higgins' thick neck and his face rivaled his fiery poll in redness. He came toward Garman with quick, eager steps.

"Hey, Hig!" laughed Payne. "Are you going to prove that he's right?"

"I came to see you about that Indian, Payne," said Garman, dismissing Higgins emphatically. "Not that I'm interested personally. Others are. Didn't he come back to you?"

"No."

"You haven't seen him since?"

"No."

"All right; neither have I. He's gone back to his people probably; Indians come and go. Now that will be all about Willy Tiger," he said in a tone of finality.

"Payne, if you're going to stay here we'd better talk like business men. I'm a business man."

"I try to be."

"Sure. No sense wasting any energy fighting. You're going to develop your tract here?"

"Going to try to; yes."

Garman studied him with new intentness for a moment.

"And yet you look like you had business sense, too."

Payne made no reply.

"You know what a poor business proposition you've got, of course," continued Garman. "Even assuming that things are as you think they are?"

"What things?"

Garman smiled slightly, a slow, amused smile.

"Payne, if I told you that I'm afraid you'd pull up stakes and get out _pronto_."

Payne laughed.

"That would leave you broken-hearted, wouldn't it, Garman?"

"No-o-o," said Garman; "but it would--well it would deprive me of your company. I'm a sociable animal, Payne. I crave company; I like to have all sorts of people about me. Take Ramos, for instance; did you ever see a more supercilious, sneaky, disagreeable specimen of the half-breed Mexican? Neither have I. You, I suppose, wouldn't have him 'round you."

"Not if I was able to kick him away."

"Exactly; and thereby you would be depriving yourself of most excellent entertainment, besides the services of a most useful servant."

"I haven't got any dirty work to be done, Garman."

Garman smoked deliberately for several seconds.

"Payne, once and for all, let this be understood between us: when I have any dirty work to be done I do it myself, with these two hands. Understand? Now, Ramos fancies himself in the supposed position of bravo. Very amusing, I assure you----"

"I don't care about Ramos and your whims, Garman," Payne interrupted.

"Of course not. Why should you? But I'd be bored to death down here if I didn't have people to play with----"

"Rot! You aren't the playing kind."

"My dear fellow," said Garman with a deep chuckle, "if I didn't have lives to play with--other people's lives--I'd die of boredom. You're young," he continued with a sudden touch of bitterness. "You're still able to draw upon the old illusions to maintain your interest in life. Ambition, work, achievement, success--Love! You're inexperienced enough to pursue the old will-o'-the-wisps that Nature has planted in man's instincts to keep him living till her purpose is served. Pah! Payne, I've tried them all, won them all, and that--" he blew out a great cloud of smoke--"that is more real and satisfying than all of them put together."

"Have your liver examined," advised Payne; "that's probably what's the matter with you."

Garman's Gargantuan burst of laughter rocked him in the saddle.

"Good boy! We'll have a lot of fun before we're through with one another. But what a materialist you are for a young fellow, Payne! What will you be at fifty if now you reduce psychological manifestations to a common physical cause? Why, man, you ought to be walking with your head in the clouds, dreaming of the one woman, the Perfect Mate, and Love, which are to make your life complete. All young fools of your age do it; why not you?"

"And so you play with other people's lives, do you?" said Payne, paying no attention to the other's raillery. "And is that what you're thinking of doing with mine?"

Garman tilted back his head and smiled through a smoke cloud. "Yes," he said softly; "unless you run away."

"Huh!"

"No, you aren't the running kind. That's what makes you interesting. That's what will make you good fun. What could be more interesting than seeing a young man like yourself want something so badly that he'd give his life for it and then suddenly place the desired object far, far beyond his reach. To watch his expression when he discovers that he's lost. To see the change from hope to despair take place in his eyes, to watch the illusions go, and the bitter truth about life take possession of him. What will he do, say and look when he discovers that the oyster of life is a hollow, empty, fraudulent shell?"

"You're raving, Garman!"

"Do you accept the challenge?"

"To the limit."

"Good boy! I knew you wouldn't disappoint me. The girl would have been worth while, but adding you, Payne, you glimpsing a dream of a fool's paradise, will be glorious!"

"You talk like a damn fool," said Payne bluntly.

Garman nodded, and with the nod his strange mood passed and he was the business man again.

"All right. That's all of that for the present. Now, what are you up against? What are your biggest problems?"

"Thanks, but I am not placing myself entirely in your hands, Garman."

"That's right; play safe. But I'm talking business now. You're tackling a hard job here. What can I do to help?"

"There's only one thing I want you to do, Garman; that's to keep your hands off this job, and to keep your men from interfering with me and my men and the job, or anything connected with it."

"That's settled. Anything else?"

"That's all. It will save trouble for both of us if you'll do that."

Garman dismissed the matter as settled with a nod, and gathered up his reins.

"Doing anything next Sunday afternoon?"

Payne thought for a moment.

"Yes; next Sunday I'll be going down the river to Gumbo Key. The ditching outfit that I've hired is due to arrive at the Key on Saturday night. I promised to meet it and see it up the river. We'll start up river Monday morning. I'll be on that dredger all the way up, Garman.

"Don't waste your time. There'll be no interference. In fact, if she needs help you can borrow the old Cormorant for a tugboat."

"No, thanks. They do their own towing."

"All right. But there's no sense of your going down there and wasting your whole Sunday on Gumbo Key. I suppose you'd do that; prejudice against breaking the Sabbath and all that? I thought so; it goes with the illusions. But there's no need for it this time--and I've been specially ordered to invite you down to my little place for Sunday afternoon. If you knew who issued the order you'd come, I know. It will be sort of an affair to welcome you to our midst. Better come, Payne; besides somebody you want to meet properly, there'll be a certain man there you ought to meet. Sunday afternoon."

"Will Mrs. Livingstone be there?"

"Pooh! Pay no attention to that. She'll be tamed by Sunday. Come about two. In the evening if you wish I'll have the Cormorant run you down the river to Gumbo Key." He paused and with a flicker of a smile added the words which he knew would evoke but one reply: "Of course if you fear it's a trap----"

"At two Sunday afternoon?" said Roger.

"Right." Garman wheeled his horse and loped away without another word.

XXI

Payne was not greatly concerned one way or another with Garman's apparent change of heart toward his enterprise. He had no intention of asking or receiving favors. All he asked was that Garman keep his hands off.

The rest of the week saw the line fence completed and a good slice of the elderberry jungle cleared away and burned. Besides this, Higgins and Payne cruised the drowned land and ran the lines where the ditches were to be dug when the ditcher should arrive. Two main ditches, running in a V from the head of the Chokohatchee, Higgins' figures showed, would drain the surface water off the thousand acres of lake which had been sold to Payne as prairie land.

In the soft mud the big ditching machine would eat its way forward at the rate of half a mile a day--a week should suffice to put the main ditches through. As soon as the surface water was off, Higgins planned for a system of short lateral ditches running at intervals into the two branches of the V. Thus every portion of the thousand-acre tract would be subject to thorough drainage. Following the drainage of the surface water the underground seepage would run off as a matter of course.

Garman apparently was as good as his word. Each morning Payne awoke expecting to find that his fence had been cut during the night, but so far the wire remained unmolested.

"That proves that Garman is boss of the whole country, cattlemen and all," said Payne one morning. "The cowman that I whipped intended to come back."

"If something had not interfered he'd have been back that night with a gang. He was so mad it must have taken something awfully strong to stop him, and that means it was Garman."

"Yes," agreed Higgins; "but I wouldn't exactly look on him as a bosom friend, if I were you."

"Pooh! I'm not fooled a bit by him. He's simply playing with me--or trying to do it. Well, we'll try to be right here, still doing business, when the game is over."

One morning a negro from the brushing crew came running up to Payne's tent in great excitement.

"Boss, boss! Trouble in the jungle oveh dah. White man driving colored boys away with rifle."

Payne followed the excited man and found that the machetes of the black gang, hacking a space in the heart of the jungle, had exposed an old clearing containing a tumble down shack. A tall, gnarled man with long hair and beard stood before the door of the shack, a Winchester held in his hands in businesslike fashion. Behind him hovered a young woman, who must have been refined and beautiful once, but who now was slatternly, and two children.

Payne called out, "Good morning, neighbor, what seems to be the difficulty?" and started toward the shack.

The man with the rifle did not reply. He merely raised the weapon till the sights were full against Roger's breast. The young man stopped.

"Don't shoot, Cal; please don't shoot!" whimpered the woman. "They're too many for you."

"Shut up!" growled the man. "Git in the house."

"Put down your gun," shouted Payne. "Tell me your trouble. My boys been bothering you?"

"You're a-botherin' me," retorted the cracker. "You cal'late to run me off my place here. Well, I ain't a-going."

Payne looked about the clearing and saw that here, hidden from all the world in the dense elder growth, the squatter had attempted and succeeded in making a primitive sort of home. Fish nets and traps, otter and coon skins, hung on the walls of the shack. In the clearing was a cultivated patch of the Seminole "contie" root, which could be ground into flour, and a scattering of domestic vegetables. On a few stunted trees were a few dried-up oranges; and on the branches of one of the larger trees was hung a swing fashioned from tough-fibered creepers. On one side of the rude shack a patch of moon vine was being trained along the wall.

"My name is Payne, neighbor," said Roger presently.

The squatter eyed him suspiciously for a long while. At last he dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm, keeping a ready thumb on the hammer.

"Mine's Blease," he said at last.

Roger regarded the man thoughtfully for a long time. To his surprise he perceived that Blease was not at all of the unfavorable type he had expected to find squatting in such a place. The man's hair was long and ragged, his beard likewise, and he was poorly nourished and clad; but Roger had lived enough in the open to learn how deceptive are external appearances in showing the true character of a man. As he looked at Blease, meeting the other's hard eyes, he sensed the true worth of the man hiding beneath the guise of a shiftless squatter. As for the woman, it was obvious that she was Blease's superior.

"Tell me, Blease," said Payne suddenly, "How long have you been living on this land?"

"'Bout two years," replied the squatter after a long pause.

"You don't pretend you have a title to it?"

Again the pause, then: "No, sir, I don't."

"Have you got a mule?" broke out Roger suddenly.

"A mule? No. Why?"

"How do you expect to do any farming without a mule? Come over to my camp next week when I get some in and I'll try to fix you up." Blease stood looking at him, tugging at his ragged beard, shifting from one foot to the other, gazing hopelessly round for an answer to the miracle. Finally he cleared his throat.

"Some catch there."

"No."

"How do you mean that, Mr. Payne?"

"Just as I say; if we have an extra mule next week we'll let you have it."

"What for?"

"To farm with. You've got to begin to make some money. You can't stay on this land any longer without a title; that isn't business. I could move you, but I don't want to; wouldn't feel right about it. I want to get you to farming right so you can make some money and buy from me the piece of ground you're squatting on. What have you got cleared here--five acres? You ought to have about ten. We'll measure off ten here, and go on with our clearing round you. Now, what do you say?"

"You mean it?"

Payne crossed the clearing and stood before the squatter.

"Do you think I'm fooling you?" he asked.

The squatter shamefacedly put his rifle away.

"My name, suh, is Calhoun Blease," he said in a new manner. "I don't understand this yit, but I do not believe you are foolin' with me, suh."

"If I am, you've still got your rifle," said Payne. "Now, tell me something: Didn't Mr. Garman send you word that my job was not to be molested or hindered?"

At the mention of Garman's name, Blease's thin figure seemed to collapse.

"Garman? Garman don't know we're here, does he? Are--are you a friend of Mr. Garman's, suh?"

"I think," replied Payne, "he is the worst enemy I've got. Do you know him?"

After a long pause Blease said slowly: "I was his caretaker over there once."

"What do you think of him?"

"He is the worst enemy any man can have," muttered the squatter. "He--don't know we're here? Good. Nobody does. He's too smart and hard to be just a man. Garman is--he--he was the devil who made us outcasts like we be--he did it. Hiding our faces from the world, account of him!"

"Do you want to tell me what he did to you?"

Blease glanced at the little shack.

"No, no. I reckon I don't want to tell you. But--Mrs. Blease once was secretary--never mind. Garman and his swimming pool---- No, I ain't telling; I ain't telling!"

XXII

The rest of the day was torture for Payne. Blease had said too much and too little for him to have any peace. He had caught one glimpse of the woman in the shack, and alternately he wished he had not seen her and that the sight of her had been more illuminating.

Blease's wife was no "cracker," no native of those parts, no type which belonged in a squatter's shack in the heart of a jungle. Her presence there seemed to cry out the news of some foul miscarriage of destiny, of a wrong to her life too hideous to imagine. Upon her face--still young--was the tale of a broken soul protesting against the wrong life had dealt it. He drew his hands across his brow to dispel the memory of that look and to try to see Mrs. Blease as she had been before it came. A high type of business secretary. Blease had started to tell and had stopped. Secretary to Garman possibly. Blease had been Garman's caretaker. Payne recalled the swimming pool with its drug-like atmosphere. What had happened there? He felt he would never know, did not wish to know. What might be happening there now?

A river of ice seemed to roll down his spine and little rivulets seemed to trickle out to the last nerve tips of his fingers, chilling him through and through; and he worked through the day dry-throated and breathing hard, conscious that a crisis in his life lay before him. Why should it affect him so? What had he to do with Garman's affairs or the affairs of those with him? The vision of the girl called Annette, as he first saw her in the dawn on Gumbo Key, stood before his eyes, and he knew how false his attempts at disinterest. Life had caught him up in a net with other lives. He thought of Garman, and groaned behind set teeth.

Night came with no surcease to the apprehension in his heart; and as if to mock his mood the scene, after a lurid sunset, was beautiful and kindly beyond compare. A mist of color like powdered silver filled the air. Soft, near-by stars blinked lazily down upon the scene, illumining it without the effect of brilliance. A half moon hung idly in the mists above the cypress trees, and long, languorous shadows streaked the silvered ground with black. In the dark jungle of elder bushes there opened long vistas of silver light, as unreal as the black tops of the far-away trees. In the unreality of the night the earth itself seemed unreal, all things appeared as shadows swimming in a dream sea of soft radiance.

Payne left his tent and walked out into the marvelous night, unsoothed by its beauty, not caring whither he went. Annette's eyes had promised she would return, and he went toward the sand prairie where he knew she rode sometimes in the cool of the evening. He came abruptly upon the wire of his line fence, and for a moment stood gripping the wires and looking off into the distance, over the sand prairie. He found himself presently by the gate he had cut in the wire as an entrance to Flower Prairie, and stood entranced by the dreamy beauty of the spot. In the center of the park the bowllike sand of a long dried-up water hole seemed overlaid by a thin sheet of silver, and the tiny palms that circled its shores were dark pillars, topped by a crown of silver leaves. The effect of the moon upon the water of the Prairie's tiny spring lake was like magic. In its silver gleam the trees, shrubs and even the flowers upon its bank were reflected vividly, and a fish swimming near the surface lifted the water in a gentle, rolling swell.