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happened. Why’d they call him Bloody Watson? And what did the Indian medicine man say?”
    Ashley pulled back the can’s flip top and let the hiss escape into the muggy Florida air. “You’re sure you want me to tell?”
    â€œPositive.”
    â€œOK. Just don’t blame me if you want out of here when you hear the story.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    M ore than a thousand years ago, the Calusa Indians lived in the Everglades. They used oyster shells to build mounds, and over the centuries the mounds rose high above water to make islands. Soil piled up on these islands, turning them into rich farmlands where the Calusas lived in harmony with animals and nature.
    After the Civil War, white men discovered this place. By the 1890s, many hunters came here to kill birds for their feathers and alligators for their hides. In those days, egret plumes were used to decorate ladies’ hats; the white, fluffy feathers were actually worth more than their weight in gold. So many egrets were killed that they almost died out. And tens of thousands of alligators got slaughtered. But the hunters skinned only the alligators’ undersides—that was the most valuable part of the hide—and left the rest to rot in the hot Florida sun.
    â€œThe earth is bleeding,” the Indians said, and it really was. “If this killing doesn’t stop,” a medicine man warned, “the land will be cursed. More blood will spill—the blood of men who don’t respect all Earth’s creatures.”
    It was just about then that the mysterious man called Bloody Watson arrived in the Everglades. With his family, he came right here, to this very spot we’re standing on, to this mangrove island that started out as a shell mound built by the Calusa Indians so long ago.
    â€œI’m not interested in hunting critters,” Mr. Watson told everyone. “All I want to do is farm and grow sugarcane.” Mostly he was very polite, tipping his hat and saying “Howdy” to the folks at Chokoloskee and Everglades City. He paid his bills on time at the grocery store and made the best sugarcane syrup in southern Florida.
    Mr. Watson always wore a black hat and a black frock coat, and beneath that coat he carried a gun, a .38 revolver. He could whip out that revolver faster than a man could blink, and he had a deadly aim.
    Everglades City was a wild town, back then. Desperadoes showed up, stayed for a while, and vanished back into the fog and the mangrove forests. Some were never seen again—at least not alive. Whenever a man got killed, Mr. Watson usually was blamed for it, even though he might have been miles away.
    Folks around these parts spread stories about Bloody Watson, trading rumors at night behind windows shuttered tightly against mosquitoes. They whispered that he was a cold-blooded killer.
    Each time Mr. Watson walked into a store or tavern, the other men acted real nervous. Mr. Watson kind of enjoyed that. If he could scare people, he figured, he could do pretty much anything he wanted to in the Everglades. When anyone dared to question him, he’d stare at them with his steely blue eyes, give a little smile, and say, “You know I never killed anybody—except in self-defense.”
    The same folks never worried much about the Indian curse. “That’s just Injun superstition,” they’d say. “They only tell it to keep us from huntin’ on their land.”
    One day a couple of fishermen were rowing close to here when they saw something sticking up in the water. Something large and gleaming white, like the underbelly of a fish. Except—it had toes! It turned out to be a human foot.
    They pulled out two bodies, one a woman who’d been Mr. Watson’s cook, the other a man who’d tended hogs on the Watson Place. When people came to investigate, they found a third murder victim—a foreman on the plantation. And in the barn, swinging from a rope,