"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?"