"And they've never missed their weekly schedule so far. Ox teams are slow, Higgins, but they're darn sure."
"You think Garman's cut us off then?"
"Higgins, if you'd studied Garman half as hard as I have you'd know he wouldn't fail to do just that thing."
At dark Blease came noiselessly to Roger's tent to substantiate this deduction.
He had followed craftily after the party which he and Higgins had driven northward from the camp, and had found them encamped on Coon Hammock, across the ox trail, a scant mile from the camp.
Roger lay on his cot that night calmly appraising his situation. To the south of the camp Garman's henchmen were in possession of his land. To the eastward lay the trackless waters of the Everglades through which only the Seminoles cared to find a way; on the west—the only way out was through Garman's grounds which meant there was no way at all. Northward there was the ox trail, now closed, and the ghastly mud of the Devil's Playground.
Garman's trap was quite complete. Roger wondered when Garman would see fit to bring its jaws together.
But Garman had contemplated and prepared a sport more pleasing to him than this. The trap did not spring; day after day passed, and the situation remained the same. The men on the muck lands guarded against trespass by day or night. The moon was losing its radiance of nights, but sufficient light still prevailed to make an attempt to cross the ditched track plain suicide. In the north the men on Coon Hammock followed the same policy. No attack was made, but neither was there opportunity for any one to pass unobserved or unharmed.
One of the negroes, weary of hiding in the swamp, tried it and came staggering back to the camp with a bullet hole in his foot. Roger reasoned that Garman's cat-and-mouse tactics were calculated to break his nerve or to provoke a fight which could have only one result. Failing in this the trap had but to be maintained and the inevitable result would be surrender.
On the first night when a slight cloudiness, promised considerable darkness Roger slipped out of his tent trained and primed for the ordeal of a passage through the Devil's Playground to Citrus Grove. He crossed the open space of Flower Prairie while a cloudlet hid the moon. In the uncertain light a course through the jungle was not to be thought of. He looked up, and, encouraged by the gathering clouds, slipped through his fence onto the sand prairie and ran northward.