up the river.

IV

Aboard the broad-beamed Swastika life was beginning to stir. The odors
of cooking food from her galley spread briskly upon the virgin morning
air. Shoes clattered upon the deck; a chatter of voices developed.
The score or more of land-seekers aboard were awake and preparing early
for the great day upon which they should behold their promised land.

Up with the earliest of them, rosy, clean shaved, soberly and richly
dressed and ministerial in dignity, was Granger, the agent, the expert
leader of this confiding flock.

Fate had created Granger for a fisher of men; greed had sent him into
the South Florida land business. His bland self-possession, his
impressive physique, his confidence-winning voice and bearing
constituted a profitable stock in trade. In the slang of his
craft--shall we say "graft"?--he "played the church game strong."
Under the sway of his hypnotic personality God-fearing, bank-fearing
old couples brought forth hidden wealth to place in his dexterous
hands; school-teachers wrecked their savings to invest with Granger.
And Granger turned the receipts over to the great masters of his
company, minus his large commission. Granger was only one tentacle of
the company, one machine for extracting money from naive, land-hungry
citizens. The powerful, cunning men--or man--behind it had many
machines.

Senator Lafayette Fairclothe was the most expensive of these machines.
It had cost much money and political trading to get his name on the
Company's literature, but it was worth more.

"The future in this country belongs to the producer; I recommend this
investment to my fellow citizens. Lafayette Fairclothe, United States
Senator."

It was worth millions. For this was in the heyday of the Florida land
boom; and the Paradise Gardens Colony, a branch of the Prairie
Highlands Association, was one of the organizations that made history
in Florida--a history that stank to high heaven, and even to
Washington, to accomplish which, experience has taught us, requires a
stench of vast and penetrating proportions indeed.

Granger had gathered his flock from afar, none nearer than a thousand
miles away from Florida's subtropics.

It was a varied throng which gathered in the Swastika's saloon for an
early breakfast. They were earnest, serious, land seekers, not
tourists. In the main they were goodly folks worn by a monotony of
life; men who had worked and women who had saved throu