Roger Payne stood looking up the river long after the boat was out of sight. He was in a daze; but he was very glad that he, too, was going up the river.
IV
Aboard the broad-beamed Swastika life was beginning to stir. The odors of cooking food from her galley spread briskly upon the virgin morning air. Shoes clattered upon the deck; a chatter of voices developed. The score or more of land-seekers aboard were awake and preparing early for the great day upon which they should behold their promised land.
Up with the earliest of them, rosy, clean shaved, soberly and richly dressed and ministerial in dignity, was Granger, the agent, the expert leader of this confiding flock.
Fate had created Granger for a fisher of men; greed had sent him into the South Florida land business. His bland self-possession, his impressive physique, his confidence-winning voice and bearing constituted a profitable stock in trade. In the slang of his craft—shall we say "graft"?—he "played the church game strong." Under the sway of his hypnotic personality God-fearing, bank-fearing old couples brought forth hidden wealth to place in his dexterous hands; school-teachers wrecked their savings to invest with Granger. And Granger turned the receipts over to the great masters of his company, minus his large commission. Granger was only one tentacle of the company, one machine for extracting money from naïve, land-hungry citizens. The powerful, cunning men—or man—behind it had many machines.
Senator Lafayette Fairclothe was the most expensive of these machines.
It had cost much money and political trading to get his name on the
Company's literature, but it was worth more.
"The future in this country belongs to the producer; I recommend this investment to my fellow citizens. Lafayette Fairclothe, United States Senator."
It was worth millions. For this was in the heyday of the Florida land boom; and the Paradise Gardens Colony, a branch of the Prairie Highlands Association, was one of the organizations that made history in Florida—a history that stank to high heaven, and even to Washington, to accomplish which, experience has taught us, requires a stench of vast and penetrating proportions indeed.
Granger had gathered his flock from afar, none nearer than a thousand miles away from Florida's subtropics.
It was a varied throng which gathered in the Swastika's saloon for an early breakfast. They were earnest, serious, land seekers, not tourists. In the main they were goodly folks worn by a monotony of life; men who had worked and women who had saved through long, gray years, buoyed up by the hope of a comfortable haven in old age to compensate them for a lifetime on the treadmill. Some of them were farmers, some small-towners, two or three were from cities; and the spell of dreams, and of Granger, was upon them all. They were dazzled, dazed. On their native heaths, perhaps as shrewd as any, here they were pleased, hopeful children in a master's hands. Ponce de León's Fountain of Youth, a plot of land in perpetual sun, where crops grow without work or worry, big land profits, easy money, something for nothing—the lure is as innate and potent as the eternal lure of gold!