"Perhaps not. It's going to be hard for him to find an excuse though. I'm here on a business proposition, as I say, and business is going to be supreme on the job, and rough work a mere incident—if at all."
"Fair enough. What's your first move?"
"To find a way out of this country without troubling friend Garman."
"Sure. The dugout was the first answer. You let that go without winking an eyelid. That means you'd already figured out a second answer. What is it?"
Payne spread out his maps and consulted them carefully.
"Garman felt he had us sewed up tight because the average man who gets down here isn't a woodsman."
"Except that fellow, Davis, I haven't seen one who looked like it since we got here," agreed Higgins.
"Yep." Payne was drawing out a new large-scale survey map. "I don't think one of the old-time timber cruisers up North would call it too big a job to get out of here. There's water almost all the way over to the east coast—the maps agree on that—so that's no good. To the south is that cypress swamp. West we've got that sand prairie. Must be some trap there. But another thing the maps all agree on is that the old trading post of Legrue, which is the end of the railroad's survey line, is about forty-five miles north of this hammock."
"Sure. And look at what's between 'em—on the map there."
"The Devil's Playground."