Old Man William Brown at Half Way Creek, he liked the way I went about my business. He liked my style and saw some future for me so he took a down payment on a wornout schooner. Young Henry Thompson of Chokoloskee signed on to teach me the sea rudiments, and as soon as we got some stores aboard, we headed south into the Islands, cutting buttonwood for charcoal to sell down at Key West and shooting a few plume birds where we found them. That gloomy boy would show me the great bend of Chatham River which became my home.

In all of the Ten Thousand Islands, Chatham Bend was the largest mound after Chokoloskee, forty acres of rich black soil going back to jungle because the squatter on there with his wife and daughter would not farm it. Like many an inhabitant of the Islands, Will Raymond Esq. was a fugitive and killer, glowering from WANTED posters all the way from Tampa to Key West. The Bend was exactly to his liking because it was surrounded by a million miles of mangrove, giving the la…