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"Let's go." All through the night, without halting save for occasional engine trouble, the little gasoline tug dragged its unwieldly tow up the tree-lined reaches of the Chokohatchee River. The moonlight illumined the waterway as with a million softly shaded lights.
Her sharp white bow cleaved the blue water of the way with slow, irresistible power. Her speed increased. In a few minutes twin waves of blue were curling away from her cutwater as, smoothly and swiftly, she raced across the bay and out of sight round the first bend of the wide mouthed Chokohatchee River. Roger Payne stood looking up the river long after the boat was out of sight.
Payne had sensed the desperation rising in the four men and he was averse to violence if it could be avoided. He was new in that country and he expected to settle there and develop his land. For a long time to come, until the contemplated railroad line came down from the north to his property, he knew the Chokohatchee River must be his means of communication with the outer world.
Besides this, Higgins and Payne cruised the drowned land and ran the lines where the ditches were to be dug when the ditcher should arrive. Two main ditches, running in a V from the head of the Chokohatchee, Higgins' figures showed, would drain the surface water off the thousand acres of lake which had been sold to Payne as prairie land.
Blocked so that not even a Seminole Indian could pole his picturesque dugout from here to the magnificently fertile lands of the Colony. "We had no way of knowing this would happen. Nevertheless, the Colony will transfer its members free of charge back to Flora City; and one week from to-day we will resume our trip up the beautiful Chokohatchee to the Paradise Colony.
But after all, it was the spirit of adventure, the love of outdoors, the instinct of the pioneer, which prompted him to buy a 1000-acre block of "prairie highland," at the headwaters of the Chokohatchee River. It was necessary to buy at once, for Trimble was after that tract for himself.
At first there was little to see save blue water, for the mouth of the Chokohatchee was more an estuary of the sea than a river.
Within a week his dredger had eaten its way through sawgrass, water and muck from the headwaters of the Chokohatchee to Deer Key, digging a broad, main drainage canal through the middle of Payne's thousand acres of drowned land. Higgins' calculations proved themselves in practice, and the big ditch soon drew off the bulk of the surface water on the track.
He went on down the main ditch toward its junction with the headwaters of the Chokohatchee River, keeping a close watch for possible lurking danger beyond his line. Near the mouth of the ditch he found a dugout evidently left behind in the flight of the guards. In the dugout he paddled the rest of the distance down the ditch, hidden from sight by the spoil banks on the canal's sides.
Payne led the way hurriedly. The path curved slightly in the direction of the river. The light of a large opening appeared ahead, and presently they came abruptly upon a clearing. A large low building, Moorish in architecture and tinted like the concrete of the pool, dominated the scene. Beyond glistened the blue water of the tiny lake which was the headwaters of the Chokohatchee River.
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