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.
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