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 system by which these Indians had survived in their unhealthy environment. "She may not look so bad when we go over her carefully," added Higgins. "Thanks," said Payne. "Optimism is good medicine to sleep on. I'm stung, of course. The Prairie Highlands Company sold this stuff to me as virgin prairie sod ready for the plow. I discounted that by fifty per cent, considering the low price. I knew enough about this land to know, in spite of lying maps, faked soil reports and photographs, that there would be some water here. I hired you because I was prepared for a drainage proposition. But I didn't think they were crooked and nervy enough to sell me a lake--that senator writing letters on his official stationery." "Maybe you've got on the wrong tract?" "You know better; you went over the maps yourself. No; they've got the crust to show this hammock in their photographs; I recognized it at once. They showed it with fat, black grassland stretching away on every side of it. They've got photographs of a town that should be located here, and of roads and ditches and farms. Their crop exhibit--crops from Prairie Highlands--is a wonder: Corn, sugar cane, potatoes, grass. Fifty per cent I discounted it; one hundred per cent would have been right." "They got soil experts to write reports on it," growled Higgins. "Or at least, to sign them. Those are pretty big names on your papers, men with big reputations. How could they do it?" "They haven't been in here," said Payne bitterly. "The thing is beginning to get a little clear. Nobody's been in here who wasn't wanted. It's simple to keep them out, with the river the only trail to come in by; so they've built up a fiction about the district, and nobody's been here to check up on it--until now." "Wonder how they got those soil men to put their names on the reports?" "Senator Fairclothe, I suppose. You can get men from Washington who can't be got any other way. What I'm wondering about is who's big enough to get him." "What!" "Did you ever know of a politician with a big name who was ever anything but a figurehead in a deal of this sort?" "I guess you're right."