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.