nd of the day now and the phenomena of the tropical
sunset served to add to the desolation of the scene. Tiny clouds rode
in the sky, multicolored from the sun, for all the world as if painted
upon the blue above. The west was livid with scarlet and orange flame,
and on the hammock the tops of the trees were rosy in the sunset.

Higgins and Payne set to work to dress the deer while Willy proceeded
to build a Seminole camp. On the highest ground of the hammock he dug
a fire hole, and radiating from it like spokes from the hub of a wheel
he dug three small ditches. With his ax he swiftly constructed three
sleeping benches of branches, building them close to the central fire
hole. Then he built his main fire of short logs in the fire hole. In
each of the little ditches he threw long logs, their ends in the fire.

Payne and Higgins watched him, expertly appreciative of his novel
woodcraft.

"It was a shame to take this country away from his kind," said Higgins.
"They know how to live in it--and like it."

Payne nodded. He was looking back over the watery waste through which
they had come.

"You got your tract located?" asked Higgins.

Payne pointed out over the saw grass waving above the drowned land on
the southern side of the hammock.

"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
s