o the bottom with a
gesture of finality.

"Well, Higgins?"

"Yes, sir! That high ground to the north is a watershed and it all
drains off onto your land. That's what drowns it."

"Right. And I drain into that river."

"Yep. You can drain your piece all right. But it'll cost like sin;
and that high elderberry ground up there will always be shedding water
onto it."

"So all I need is to get hold of that piece up there."

"Hah! So that's what you were thinking about? Who owns it?"

"Not this crooked Prairie Company. It's owned by the Southern Cypress
Company. They own so much land they probably don't know what they've
got over here. We'll get breakfast and hustle back to a wire some
place. I'll think it over. I may buy that piece. Then we'll have
something to do business with."

"Well, you'd better hurry or your breakfast will be gone," spoke a
voice from the hammock. "Willy Tiger had it all ready when we arrived."

Payne stepped from the canoe and strode toward the two men who were
seated at the camp fire. One of them rose and he recognized the dark
face of Ramos. Then he saw Willy Tiger's crumpled body lying like a
sack of grain across one of the sleeping benches.

Payne looked at the man who had spoken, who remained seated. He looked
at him steadily for a long while. Then he said: "My name is Payne. I
guess you're Mr. Garman."

XII

"You're right."

The seated man was nibbling a piece of venison on a broiling stick and
did not look up.

"I'm Garman."

He finished the venison, wiped his drooping, fawn-colored mustache with
a silk handkerchief, displaying as he did so the two large diamonds
upon his fingers; and through his heavy, yellow eyebrows he looked up
lazily.

As he sat squatted there by the fire Garman's figure gave an impression
of squatness and of grossness in proportions and flesh. The closely
cropped head was of a size sufficient to dominate the huge body, and by
the harsh salients of the jaws, the great forehead and the flat back
head, gave evidence that but for its pink-fleshed rotundity the head
might have appeared nearly square. The backs of the hands which drew
the silk handkerchief delicately across the thick red lips beneath the
drooping mustache were covered to the fingernails with a fell of thick
yellow hair; only the fat white palms were bare, like the insides of a
gorilla's paws.

"Payne, eh?" said Garman with a flash of white teeth showing through