“Plume birds and gators?”
“Well, them things was our livelihood! Anyways, we never took much, only the belly flats and plumes!” Harden grinned, clearing a backlash from his reel. “Couldn’t let all them poor Yankee ladies pine away for egret bonnets and nice alligator boots!” But while he picked and fiddled, his mood changed. “Ain’t that somethin, what we done, and our forefathers, too? Leavin all them carcasses to rot day after day? Ate at my gizzard every time I done it. I purely hate to think about them hides stacked in that house. I do. But if them wild critters ever come back the way they was, I reckon I’d do the same damn thing all over.”
Whidden cast a bright white-feathered lure across the broad expanding smiles of turning water. The disks of current moved downriver, slow as planets, and the tide changed, and the wind shifted. They drifted downriver toward First Lost Man’s Bay. Like an ancient fort in the river mouth, Lost Man’s Key rose in black subtropic tangle, eclipsing the sun as it started its slow fall to the Gulf horizon.
WHIDDEN HARDEN
Alderman Point upriver there got that name back in 1915, when you was in Fort Myers. That year, times was very hard—the fishin poor, no jobs to speak of, nothin but clammin, rickin charcoal. But the Ashley boys was getting by, robbing banks and such on the east coast. So Leland and Frank Rice and Hugh Alderman, along with a stranger name of Tucker—them four fellers give it a try and robbed the Homestead bank. We always heard them Rice boys was in the crowd killed Mr. Watson, but I reckon you know all about that, better’n me.
The Rice-Alderman gang escaped after a shooting scrape at Jewfish Creek, over in the east of Florida Bay. They killed two deputies. A fisherman took ’em as far west as Flamingo, where they hired a boat to take them north around the Cape. Man dropped ’em off at a place up Lost Man’s River—Alderman Point—and probably these boys bought some supplies off our Harden family. The Rice gang didn’t want to stay no place too long. Knowin the back creeks, they rowed as far as Lopez River. Hugh Alderman’s cousin Walter had married Marie Lopez, and they figured they would get a little help. All they got was water from the cistern, cause the Lopez Place was empty. Next thing, their skiff drifted off, and they had to clamber through the mangroves all the way downriver to the nearest point across from Chokoloskee. By that time a reward notice was posted on the door at Smallwood’s post office.
At dusk, Leland swum over to the island. Two boys seen him swimming and bushwhacked him when he come ashore. Harley Wiggins and a younger boy. Remember Harley? Big, dark-complected feller? And that younger boy was Crockett Daniels—Speck. Them boys was nervous, they just shot and run, and Leland crawled away. The sun went down before the word got out that a wounded bank robber was out there in the dark. Only ones who weren’t scared to death were Rob Storter and his pretty Cassie who come in late from fishing and never knowed a thing about it. Next morning Old Man McDuff Johnson come pounding on the door, informin Rob he had a dead man on his stoop. It was Leland Rice with a pistol in one pocket and five thousand dollars in the other.
It bothered people that them boys killed Leland Rice for the reward. Everybody knew the Rice boys, they were real nice fellers, never made no trouble. They weren’t local men, they come from up around Lake Okeechobee, but they fished around here for some years and they had kinfolk on the island.
Them boys always claimed they tried to arrest Leland, but he went for his gun and so they had to shoot him. Maybe that’s the way it was. I wasn’t there. But shooting a feller for a cash reward? Weren’t nobody felt good about that killing. Harley’s sister still don’t like to talk about it! Maybe twenty years later, when that Rice story come up in a conversation, she sat up very straight and stiff and tugged her skirt. “Harley Wiggins is my brother and he never said a thing about it, not to me!” That was the last we ever heard on that subject!
The men wrapped Leland in a canvas shroud and buried him. They took Leland’s money to Ted Smallwood, thinking the postmaster would know what to do with it, but Ted was a stickler for minding his own business, he didn’t want the responsibility. Ted weren’t one to turn his nose up at five thousand dollars, but he knew it wouldn’t be much use to him if he was dead. Some tough hombre with a gun was bound to come hunting for that money, and he did not care to be the one holding the bag. When Ted said that, the rest decided they didn’t want nothing to do with that blood money. They turned it over to the captain of the Pal, a big old boat that run produce once a week to Punta Gorda.