“No.”

“I’ll let you read it over a bit.  Maybe you’ll git a idea from it.”

He extracted the parchment from his safe, and spread it before them.  “Kind of look careful along toward the end—­in the tail feathers of it, so to speak,” he advised.

They did so, and Crane looked up at the fat hardware man with eyes that were not quite so contemptuous.  “By George!” he said, “this thing’s a charter for a railroad down the valley, too.”

“Uh-huh!” said Scattergood.  “Dunno’s the boys quite see what it was all about, but they calculated to please me, so they put it through jest as it stood.  Mighty nice fellers up to the legislature.”

“Pretty far in the future,” said Keith, “and mighty expensive.”

“Maybe not so far,” said Scattergood, “and I could make a darn good start narrow-gaugin’ it with a hunderd thousand.”

“Which you’ve got handy for use,” said Crane.

“There is that much money,” said Scattergood, “and if there is, why, it kin be got.”

“Let’s get back to the river, now,” said Keith.  “If we’re going to start lumbering in a year, say, we’ve got to have the river in shape.  Take quite some time to get it cleared and dammed and boomed.”

“Six months,” said Scattergood.

“Cost a right smart pile.”

“The work I’m figgerin’ on would come to about thirty-odd thousand.”

“Which you haven’t got.”

“Somebody has,” said Scattergood.

“We have,” said Crane.  “That’s why we came to you—­and with a proposition.  You’ve grabbed this thing off, but you can’t hog it, because you haven’t the money to put it through.  Our offer is this:  You put in your locations and your charter against our money.  We’ll finance it.  Your enterprise entitles you to control.  We won’t dispute that.  You can have fifty-one per cent of the stock for what you’ve contributed.  We take the rest for financing.  We’re known, and can get money.”

“How you figger to work it?”

“We’ll bond for forty thousand dollars.  Keith and I can place the bonds.  That’ll give us money to go ahead.”

Scattergood reached down and took off a huge shoe.  Usually he thought more accurately when his feet were unconfined.  “That means we’d sort of mortgage the whole thing, eh?”

“That’s the idea.”

“And if we didn’t pay interest on the bonds, why, the fellers that had ’em could foreclose?”

“But we needn’t worry about that.”

“Not,” said Scattergood, “if you fellers sign a contract with the dam and boom company to give them the exclusive job of drivin’ all your timber at, say, sixty cents a thousand feet of logs.  And if you’d stick a clause in that contract that you’d begin cuttin’ within twelve months from date.”

“Sure we’d do that,” said Keith.  “To our advantage as much as to yours.”

“To be sure,” said Scattergood.

“It’s a deal, then?”