“Arrest me for trespissin, then.”
He came up to the bars. “Who the hell are you, anyway? And don’t give me no name that you can’t prove: we got a telegraph.”
I told him my new name and lawful occupation: E. Jack Watson, farmer.
“Pretty handy with weapons for a goddamn farmer.” He shook his head while we listened to the yells and banging. “You seen that crowd out there. How come you didn’t keep on riding, mister?”
“You fellers pay what I’ve got coming and I’ll ride.”
Brooding about justice and injustice, the sheriff grunted low down in his chest like an old boar. “You might not have much use for your dirty money when that crowd catches you.” However, he went to fetch me my reward and I waved Durrance over to my bars. “I bet you hoped that crowd would have me hung by the time you got here, Will. Better luck next time.”
Durrance reached into his jacket, his brow all beetled up with honest worry over good money lying loose in a lynched man’s pocket. “Jack, it ain’t like you done this just for me-”
“You offered me blood money, Will. Want them to know?” I nodded toward the window. His fingers had emerged empty from his pockets but now they crept back in. Scowling, he forked over a small bag of gold coins, twenty dollars each.
The sheriff returned with the reward in hundred-dollar bills. He walked me to the jailhouse door, recommending that I leave at once. The Grangers were outside around the corner, tending my horse. They would empty their six- guns in the air when the door opened, to scatter the crowd and give me a head start. “Them citizens ain’t lookin to get shot,” the sheriff said. “Not for Quinn Bass.”
These two seemed cheerful in their confidence that their cash would be retrieved from my remains. Swinging open the jailhouse door, Durrance wished me luck. “Same to you,” I said. I yanked him in front of me and poked my weapon hard into his back, trotting him over to the horses. The Grangers were already yipping, shooting into the air, and the groaning crowd was milling, stupid as spooked steers at the slaughterhouse gate. Durrance hollered, “Don’t shoot, boys! It’s me!” Right then, some fool opened fire and a bullet whined too close past my ear. I mounted quick, dragging Durrance up behind to cover my back.
Taking no chances, I rode Durrance to the river. He fell off, sore-assed and stiff, still belly-aching about his money: he claimed that my new Winchester was not part of the deal. Not wishing to risk my good fortune by being greedy, I tossed him the rifle. He didn’t thank me, only whined about wild beasts. I scattered a few cartridges onto the ground and galloped to the ford. The night was dark, just a sliver of new moon, as I crossed over the Peace River into new country.
From the shack cluster at Alva, I crossed the broad Calusa on the cattle barge and rode down the south bank into Fort Myers, where I boarded my lame horse at the livery stable, bought a new set of clothes and boots (there were no stores south of here, only frontier outposts), and asked some questions about life on this far southwest coast. After a few days, one jump ahead of an inquiry from Arcadia, I sailed downriver to the Gulf of Mexico on the schooner
My first impression of the great might of the sea dismayed me, the vastness of it and the unforgiving emptiness and the rough seas that threatened to engulf this craft and all its puking sinners, myself included. But eventually the wind moderated and I splashed my face and struck up acquaintance with the captain, William Collier, who straightened me out with a tin cupful of dark fiery Jamaica rum. Captain Bill imparted a few fundamentals of coastal piloting and entrusted me for a time with the ship’s helm so that I might feel the workings of the deep.
South of Marco Island, the few small settlements lay hidden in the bays behind the barrier islands: the wall of green was as faceless as the sea. Yet the prospect of so much virgin coast awaiting man’s dominion filled me with excitement, even hope. I was still a fugitive, ever farther from my family, but for the first time in my life, I had the capital to establish my own enterprise on my own land, which was here for the claiming. I would find good soil, get a first crop under way while I built a cabin, bring in pigs and chickens, send for Mandy and the children-that was all the plan I needed for a year or two, but all the while, I would look around for opportunity. This Everglades frontier was a huge wilderness to be tamed and harnessed. I had the strength and an ambition made more fierce by so much failure. It was up to me.
CHAPTER 4
TEN THOUSAND ISLANDS
Three miles inland from the open Gulf, between the Islands and the mainland, Chokoloskee Bay was a broad shallow flat almost nine miles long and up to two miles wide. At low tide, it was so shallow that herons walked like Jesus on the pewter shine a half mile from shore, and all around looked like the end of nowhere-mudbanks and islets gathered into walls of mangrove jungle, with strange stilt roots growing in salt water and leaves which stayed that leathery hard green all year around. For a man from the North, used to the hardwood seasons and their colors, this tide-flooded and inhospitable tangle that never changed was going to take a lot of getting used to.
That professor at last year’s World Fair in Chicago who told the country it had no more frontiers had sure as hell never heard about the Everglades: in all south Florida, there was no road nor even a rough track, only faint Injun water trails across the swamps to the far hammocks. This southwest coast, called the Ten Thousand Islands, was like a giant jigsaw puzzle pulled apart, the pieces separated by wild rivers, lonesome bays, and estuaries where lost creeks and alligator sloughs, tobacco-colored from the tannin, continued westward through the mangrove islands to the Gulf as brackish tidal rivers swollen with rain and mud, carving broad channels.
Early in 1894, the
Smallwoods and McKinneys from Columbia County had joined the few families on Chokoloskee, a high Indian mound of 150 acres at the south end of the Bay. Both men farmed and set up trading posts, and C. G. McKinney was learning from a book how to pull teeth or babies, all depending. Both were smart self-educated men, among the few on this long coast who knew how to read. Smallwood had even poked around in the Greek literature, swapping books with an old French hermit down the coast named Chevelier, who had scraped acquaintance with every field of knowledge, said McKinney, except how to get on with other human beings.
I took some rough work cutting sugarcane for Storters, who had their plantation down the Bay at Half Way Creek (halfway between Everglade and Chokoloskee). Cutting cane was mean hard labor for drifters, drunks, and nigras, but I never was a man afraid of sweat, and any old job suited me fine while I figured out how a man might work this country. I saw straight off that these palmetto shack communities, backed up against dense mangrove, were no place for a wanted man without a boat who never knew when some lawman from the North might come here hunting him.
Mr. William Brown at Half Way Creek liked the way I went about my business. He accepted a down payment on a worn-out schooner, the
In all of the Ten Thousand Islands, Chatham Bend was the largest Indian mound after Chokoloskee, forty acres of rich black soil disappearing under jungle because the squatter on there with his wife and daughter would not farm it; they were mostly plume bird hunters, living along on grits and mullet. Like more than one Island inhabitant,
