"What do you mean?"
"It's a deserted river. Only ghosts stay here. The plantations are grown over, the houses rotting and little sticks in the ground tell where the old owners are. The climate is so bad that skull and bone notices grow on the trees. Then things happen. People eat something and die, or fall out of their boats and drown, or go out in the woods and stay till the buzzards find them. Oh, but it's the peaceful, lovely Rodgers River!"
"Why, where did you hear all that, Dick?"
"From Mr. Streeter. He talked a lot and I didn't forget much that he said. Then Johnny had heard the talk of convicts, and others who ought to have been, and told me about them almost in a whisper, for fear somebody would hear him."
"There's a rotting old shack, now, by that date palm. Are you afraid of ghosts?"
"No, rather like 'em. I wouldn't mind camping with them for a day or two, with you for company."
The house looked too spooky and snaky to live in, and the boys made their camp in the open, near a tamarind tree and, as they observed later, beside an overgrown grave. An old barrel under the eaves of the house was nearly full of rain water, which they were likely to need, since their only supply of fresh water was contained in a five-gallon can, which would hold about two days' requirements. The rain water was good and would have been better but for Ned's gruesome inquiry:
"You don't suppose it has been poisoned, do you, Dick?"
On their first afternoon the boys crossed the swampy jungle in the rear of the old plantation and found themselves on a typical South Florida prairie. On it were oases of fire-blackened palmettos, little ponds, palmetto scrub and bits of soggy meadow, in which they often sank to their knees, as they plodded across them. There were tracks of wild animals in the meadows and regular trails of alligators between the ponds. Billy stopped beside one of the ponds and grunted, as he had been taught by Johnny, until a little 'gator showed his head.