Hamil's engineers were still occupied with the drainage problem, but a happy solution was now in sight.

Woodcutters had already begun work on the great central forest avenue stretching straight away for four miles between green jungles topped by giant oaks, magnolias, and palmettos; lesser drives and chair trails were being planned, blazed, and traced out; sample coquina concrete blocks had been delivered, and a rickety narrow-gauge railroad was now being installed with spidery branches reaching out through the monotonous flat woods and creeping around the boundaries where a nine-foot game-proof fence of woven buffalo wire was being erected on cypress posts by hundreds of negroes.

Around this went a telephone and telegraph wire connected with the house and the gamekeeper's lodges.
Beyond the vast park lay an unbroken wilderness.

This had already been surveyed and there remained nothing to do except to pierce it with a wide main trail and erect a few patrol camps of palmetto logs within convenient reach of the duck-haunted lagoons.
And now toward the end of the month, as contractor after contractor arrived with gangs of negroes and were swallowed up in the distant woodlands, the interest in the Cardross household became acute.

From the front entrance of the house guests and family could see the great avenue which was being cleared through the forest--could see the vista growing hour by hour as the huge trees swayed, bent, and came crashing earthward.