“You’ll get nothing more until one o’clock when we knock off for an hour,” returned his friend. “And at that the ship’s biscuits are better than the mess we get at noon. If you don’t eat, you’ll pass out in short order. Make it snappy, too—they don’t give us much time.”
Bill nodded and after ridding the biscuit of as many worms as he could find, gulped down half of the tepid water in his crock and dunked his breakfast in the remainder. While the stonelike substance was softening, he studied the young Seminole chief. By daylight, Osceola proved to be a tall, rangy fellow, with the finely cut features and the high cheek bones of his race. Like most of the slaves, he wore nothing but frayed trousers and Bill saw that his red-bronze back was crisscrossed with ugly welts from the lash.
When the biscuit was soft enough to eat, Bill crunched it between his teeth and forced it down with the rest of the water. The evil mess gagged him in spite of his hunger, but he could not afford to starve and lose his strength. By the time he had finished, the slave gang were ordered to their feet again.
Down to the shed they marched, and after depositing their empty water crocks on a table, they were crowded over to the wall of the compound. An overseer, armed with shortstocked whip and automatic revolver unbarred the double doors of the stockade and swung them inward. The guards, armed like their leader, took their places on either side of the long line, and two by two the slaves moved forward on to the corduroy road.
This time, instead of going down toward the lagoon and the dock where the amphibian lay moored, they turned off on a side road. This wound through the swamp between great cypresses whose dark green foliage was intertwined with the lighter green of vines and air-plants, and other parasites. Exposed roots of the trees, interlocked with the roots of their neighbors, looked like giant snakes twisting in and out of the muck and water. Though the sun was but half an hour high the steaming swamp seemed to sap every ounce of Bill’s vitality, and with it, the last shred of that hope to which he clung so desperately. In the cavernous gloom of the forest, the vile stench of rotting mangrove was nearly overpowering; and as they plodded on, the heat grew more and more oppressive.
The log roadway was never more than ten feet wide, and sometimes, where it was built to run between two mighty trees, it was even narrower. It wound an uneven passage through the swamp, until about a mile from the stockade, it came out on a lagoon, dotted with cypress-covered islands. Here, sunlight brightened the long stretches of open water, and Bill saw that lovely orchids bloomed on many of the trees, and that the matted upper branches of the cypresses were brilliant with masses of flowers. Then a black blob on a root near the road uncurled itself, one of the guards tossed a stick and a huge snake slid into the water.
The roadway extended along the lagoon’s edge for half a mile. Though it ended abruptly at this point, Bill saw that preparations were in view to extend it further.
“Those are the gold dredges,” affirmed Osceola, indicating three hulks which looked like crosses between coal barges and canal boats. “Those big funnels at the ends, sticking into the water, are the suction pipes.”
“How do the dredges work?” Bill inquired as they drew nearer.
“They are driven by stationary steam engines,” explained the young Chief. “Muck and water are sucked up from the lagoon’s bottom, then forced through screens and allowed to flow in shallow streams over wide inclined surfaces called tables. These tables are corrugated in such a way that all heavy substances in the silt, like fine particles of gold, are caught in the channels and washed down on to the blankets, while the lighter stuff passes over the side.”