Sure enough, Frank Rice swum over from the east side of the Bay and asked after his brother and they told him that since he seen him last, Leland was dead and buried. So after Frank had blew his nose and put his neckerchief away, he asked where that money might be and was told he could go claim it on the Pal, which was tied up to a fish house off of Smallwood’s. But when Frank rowed out, tried to climb aboard, a sniper hid back in the mangrove put a bullet in his back, and he dropped back into the water. He was hauled aboard and patched up some, and he lived long enough to die in prison.
Next day Hugh Alderman decided to swim over, and the fourth man, Tucker, followed. Told Hugh he’d rather go to prison than spend another day with them damned miskiters, and anyways he was dog sick from eatin raw orsters morning, noon, and night. Those were John Tucker’s last complaints, cause he didn’t swim good and he didn’t make it. The mud bar where his body came ashore is still Tucker Key today. He lay in the sun quite a good while, and by the time Ted Smallwood whacked a box together and they got him buried, he had turned black as any nigra that you ever seen.
Some claimed that Tucker was the brother of that feller who got killed at the turn of the century at Lost Man’s River, because once before, when this same man come through Chokoloskee on his own two feet, he said he was gunnin for Ed Watson. Must of stayed away a good long while, getting his nerve up, cause by the time he got here, his intended victim was five years in the grave. Maybe the poor feller went over to bank robbing because he had all that nerve saved up and didn’t want to let it go to waste. Then Bill House took a good look at that body and come up with the opinion that the dead man weren’t nobody but young Rob Watson, who had ran away at the time of the Tucker killings, but it looks like Bill might of been wrong, as usual.
Who ended up with all that money no one knows. There’s some will tell you Sheriff Tippins kept it so safe that he could never find it, and others spread stories how Ted Smallwood offered to hold it for Hugh Alderman. Smallwood kept all of his own money rolled up in deep pockets sewed inside his coveralls, never got separated from his greenbacks for two minutes, and maybe that measly ol’ five thousand dollars got lost way down inside. Anyways, when the banks come looking, them fellers scratched their heads, tried to think back about it, but none of ’em could rightly recall where that durn money could of got to.
Most folks believed that the ones who shot Frank Rice and near to drowned him were the same ones who killed his brother Leland, and they never did forgive them two young fellers. Some said them boys picked up their bad attitudes from seeing Ed Watson shot to pieces, because both of ’em was among them ones who run down there and shot into the body. Anyways, folks were ashamed of them young bushwhackers. This is a coast where moonshining and smuggling go back a hundred years and more, but there never had been no local crime to speak of. Cash could lay for a week on the kitchen table, wouldn’t nobody touch it.
Leland lay on that doorstep all night long with five thousand dollars in his pocket and nobody touched him. Might of took his life for a two-hundred-buck reward, but nobody stole that feller’s hard-earned money. He had a big diamond on his finger when they buried him, and nobody touched that diamond neither, though there was talk about a feller who might of gone back with his shovel later on.
All Whidden and Lucius had brought back to enhance a supper of dark bread and baked beans was one thin sea trout, a small jack, and a pail of oysters. “Beans and mullet, grits and mullet—that sticks to your belly,” Whidden commented. “Trout and jack don’t scarcely do the job.” They squatted at the water’s edge scaling and cleaning fish and shucking oysters while Sally scavenged driftwood for the fire.
“I was tellin Sally,” Andy said, “that the ones who lasted in the Islands was hard men—they had to be. Lee Harden and his brothers was as tough as knotholes and Lee had that temper. All the same, he was kinder and broader in his mind than most. My daddy knew him from way back, in the Frenchman’s time. His Sadie was a strong woman, too, and she was kind—she was just wonderful! Fine people! Hung on here at Lost Man’s till the end. Hardens lived here more than seventy years, the first real settlers to come here and the last to go—the greatest pioneer clan in the Islands!”
“Hear that, Mr. Whidden?” Sally cried, delighted, throwing down her driftwood. “That sure is right!”
Her husband nodded. “My pa always said that the one thing he was glad of, his daddy wasn’t here to see us leave. Granddad Robert died in the nick of time, at 106 years old, and Parks run us out of here the followin year. For a little while, we come back in the summers, set some nets from May until September. Pa was the only Harden who had title to his property, a lifetime right, but we weren’t allowed to build nothin nor plant a garden. Pa got him a little houseboat we could camp on, cause we couldn’t set up so much as a lean- to on the shore. Couldn’t hunt nor trap nor gather nothin—all we done was fish. The more Pa visited, the more he’d grieve, and pretty soon, he give it up for good. Lost Man’s was what he worked for his whole life, and the loss of it took the heart out of him, though he lived along in Naples for a few more years. I will say for the first park ranger, he knew how hard it was for the old-timers. He’d turn his head if Sadie Harden took sea turtle eggs or netted terrapins. Before that, he worked as an Audubon warden and had made good friends among the Island people.”