"Mr. Payne, I take it?"

Roger turned to face the speaker, a tall, hawk-nosed man whose sallow, leathery face was set in the lines of the hard worker.

"Yes, I'm Payne. Are you the captain?"

"I'm boss of the ditching outfit, Mr. Payne. White's my name. Was you planning we should lay up at Gumbo Key to-night?"

Roger looked across the bay at the last glimpse of the Egret's white hull as she sped into the mouth of the river. The setting sun glinted on paint and nickel and brasswork. It was fancy, perhaps, but he seemed to make out the figure of Annette still leaning over the starboard rail.

"Yes—I was," he said slowly. The Egret shifted her course slightly, and like the snuffing of a light disappeared round the first bend in the river.

"Well, I dunno," said White. "So far's I'm concerned the quicker I get my outfit up the river the better I'll like it."

"Do you know the river well?"

"Reckon I do."

"Can you run it by night?"

"Shore can—especially as it's going to be broad moonlight."

"All right," said Roger. "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. The Spanish moss which hung from the live oak and cypress along the bank was transmuted into scintillating draperies of twinkling silver. Upon the flowing water the light lay like an immutable sheen, seemingly a part of the flowing current, an endless stream of molten silver. Fishes, snakes and nocturnal animals broke and rippled the sheen of the water's surface. A huge, sharp fin ripping the silver before the tug's bows told of a tarpon strayed far inland with the tide. An otter's head, round and hard, jutted up, looked round, dove again.

In the magic light and shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and wheelhouse silvered and mellowed. The twin wire cables stretching back to the tow became two glistening silver ropes. At their ends, cavernous gloomy and grimy despite the moonlight, wallowed the high bulky hull of the ditcher's scow.

To Roger Payne, standing beside White in the little wheelhouse, the mournful chuckle of the Southern nightingale, as it sounded time after time from the cavernous darkness of the jungle shore seemed to strike at him personally with a note of knowing mockery. The weirdness and the elusiveness of the scene seemed the inevitable ending of the strange day. On the rippling water the moonbeams twinkled like silvery fairy sprites at play; and in the junglelike woods on the shores yawned great caverns of darkness, their evil suggestiveness only heightened by the bars of light shooting down through the matted leaves.

Back on the scow a sleepless negro, lying face up to the moonlight, began to croon weirdly.

"What in the devil do you call that?" asked Roger.

White listened, his head to one side.

"Haiti nigger—French patois," was his reply. "There; catch the 'mom'selle'? Haiti nigger singing."

He reached down and picked up a bolt.

"Haiti negro?" said Roger, puzzled. "How did he get in that gang?"

"Oh, they drift over once in a while." White was measuring the distance to the scow.

The bolt hummed through the air, struck the ditcher's shovels with a clang and splashed into the water.

"Missed!" growled White. "Shut up, you Sam. This ain't no voodoo outfit."

"Voodoo!" Roger laughed mirthlessly. "That would be the finishing touch."

"How come?" said White, puzzled.

"Do you happen to know Mr. Garman, White?"

"I was 'specting you to ask that, Mr. Payne," was the drawled reply. "I got this to say: I know Garman, but that's all. I dig ditches for my living. I dig 'em fast and I dig 'em good; and—and that's all I'm up here for, one way or 'nother."

"Right! and the faster you dig 'em, the better it will suit me."

"Me, too," was the earnest reply.

Roger looked at the man sharply.

"Why? Don't you like the job?"

"The job's all right. I've said I'd dig 'em, and I'll dig 'em fast. But the quicker I get done, and the quicker I get my outfit pointed downstream again, and the quicker I'm out of this river, the better suited I'll be. That's all I'm saying."

Roger laughed grimly.

"You talk like you'd had dealings with Garman before, White?"

"That's all I'm saying," repeated the man. Then suddenly: "What's that?"

A clear shaft of light pierced the moonmist ahead, lighting a broad space in the river from the next bend down to the tug. While they watched in fascination the light came nearer, flashing in their eyes, and behind it resounded the unmistakable hum of the Egret's engines. Compared to the crawling pace of the tug the yacht seemed to leap out of the night straight at them.

"Yo hoo!" yelled White. "Look out! Want to run us down?"

A full-throated laugh rang out from the Egret's bridge as her course was changed slightly and her engines throttled down. On the bridge beside the searchlight Roger saw Garman's huge figure looming.

"Ho, Payne!" came a hail. "Didn't see anything of the —— we're after, did you?"

"Not to recognize by that description," replied Roger.

"A —— by any other name would look the same," laughed Garman. He leaned over the rail, smoking furiously, his eyes alight with the savage joy of the chase. "Yes, and he'd stand just as much chance of getting out alive. I'll get him. He got away from Palm Island into the swamp. Punctured your friend Ramos in doing so." His laugh rolled over the water like the growl of a bear. "In fact, punctured him so successfully that we had to cover Mr. Ramos with three feet of dirt to cheat the buzzards.—White, is that you?"

"Yessir."

"Well, White, you do your best for Mr. Payne. He's in a hurry to get his ditches dug. Do your best for him for he's a particular friend of mine—and of some one else." He laughed again, shouted an order, and the Egret leaped past them and on down the river.

"Ghost boat, ghost boat!" The Haiti black, back on the scow, waking up from his sleep, had stared full in the eye of the Egret's searchlight, and now was staggering round, terror-stricken and dazed.

"Knock him down somebody," called White calmly.

"Ghost boat, ghost boat!"

"Where?"

"Down the—uh! Oh, ma Dieu!"

The Egret and her light had disappeared round a bend and the negro was pointing at the empty moonlit river. Hoots of laughter greeted him.

"Guess you got 'em, Sam. No other boat round here."

"Ma Dieu! Ah seen him. Yoh gen'men sho' they wasn't no boat?"

"You're raving. No boat at all."

"Oh—Oh——!"

"Shut up!" cried White. "Shut up!"

A moment's silence. Then, from a black corner on the ditcher came the negro's voice, moaning in cutting minor notes a primitive jungle croon of fear and terror. White laughed grimly, making no effort to quiet him. Roger stared up the river and made out a flicker of purple light shooting up from the eastern horizon into the misty heavens.

"Thank God!" he said in relief. "Daylight is coming."

He leaped ashore as the tug ran close to an out-jutting point of high land below Garman's, and cut straight across the prairie toward his camp. The sunburst of dawn was at its gaudiest when he came within sight of the tents and he caught the glint of sun on the bare matchets of the clearing gang as the men prepared for the day's work. Higgins was standing before his tent, smoking and chafing the men.

"Everything all right, Hig?" asked Roger with false calm.

"All right? Sure. Why wouldn't it be?" Higgins took the pipe from his lips and looked closer.

"Hi! What's up? What's happened to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you don't have to tell me, of course; but—but what in the name of smoked fish makes you look as if you'd been through the Devil's Playground again?"

Higgins breathed hard after Roger had completed the tale of Garman's man hunt.

"That's a damn lie about Ramos!" he said. "If he's dead Garman's gang killed him—-Garman himself probably—afterwards."

"How do you know?"

"Willy High Pockets has been here."

"What!"

"Yep. I had him hid down in Blease's shack, but he beat it away."

"Then it was that poor Indian Garman was after!"

"Not quite. There was a white man, too. A guy that Willy met out in the swamp some place when he beat it that day after Garman had handled him. It was this white man that Garman was after. Willy was with him. Garman's bunch had 'em trapped on an island down in the swamp, but Willy happened to know an Injun way out and they slipped the noose. Willy came crawling in here last night. He's got a tear from a forty-four along his hip and the white man sent him to us to get it doctored up and keep him hidden. I slipped down to Blease's and fixed it up with them to hide him, but he slipped away to join that white man as soon as we had him sewed up.

"Where is the white man?"

"Still out in the swamp. He steered Willy till they saw the tents and then he beat it back."

"Who is he?"

"Don't know; Willy wasn't telling."

"What does Garman want to get him for?"

"Willy 'donno' that either. He 'donno' anything at all about this guy in the swamp. But he did tell a straight story about the sneak they made; and there wasn't a shot fired on either side, so Ramos wasn't shot then. I'll bank on Willy's word for that."