“Far’s I’m concerned,” said Scattergood, slipping his foot inside his shoe, “it is.”

That afternoon, the papers having been signed and the deal consummated, Scattergood sat cogitating.

“I’ve been done,” he said to himself, solemnly, “accordin’ to them fellers’ notion.  They come and seen me, and done me.  They planned out how they’d do it, and I didn’t never suspect a thing.  Uh-huh!  Seems like I was unfortunate, just gettin’ a start in life like I be....  Bonds, says they.  Uh-huh!  They’ll place ’em, and place ’em handy.  First int’rest day there won’t be no int’rest, and them bonds’ll be foreclosed—­and where’ll I be?  Mighty ingenious fellers, Crane and Keith....  And I up and walked right into it like a fly into a molasses barrel.  Them fellers,” he said, even more somberly, “come here calc’latin’ to cheat me out of my river....  Me bein’ jest a fat man without no brains....”

Crane and Keith had left Scattergood the executive head of the new dam and boom company, and had confided to him the task of building the dam and improving the river.  He approached it sadly.

“Might as well save what I kin out of the wreck,” he said to himself, and quietly manufactured a dummy contracting company to whom he let the entire job for a lump sum of thirty-eight thousand seven hundred dollars.  The dummy contractor was Scattergood Baines.

The dam was completed, booms and cribbing placed, ledges blasted out well within the six months’ period set for those operations.  Every thirty days Scattergood, in the name of the dummy contractor, was paid eighty per cent of his estimates, and at the completion of the work he received the remainder of the whole sum.

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ done it to them boys,” he said, as he surveyed a deposit of upward of seven thousand dollars, his profit on the transaction, “if it hadn’t ‘a’ been they organized to cheat me out of my river.  I calc’late in the circumstances, though, I’m most entitled to what I kin salvage out of the wreck.”

Now the Coldriver Dam and Boom Company, Scattergood Baines president and manager, was ready for business, which was to take the logs of Messrs. Crane and Keith and drive them down the river at the rate of sixty cents per thousand feet.  It was ready and eager, and so expressed itself in quaintly worded communications from Baines to those gentlemen.  But no logs appeared to be driven.

“Jest like I said,” Scattergood told himself, and, the day being hot and the road dusty, he removed his shoes and rested his sweltering bulk in the shade to consider it.

“It’s a nice river,” he said, audibly.  “I hate to git done out of it.”

After long delays Crane and Keith made pretense of building camps and starting to log.  But one difficulty after another descended on their operations.  In the spring, when each of them should have had several millions of feet of spruce ready to roll into the water, not a log was on rollways.  Not a man was in the camps, for, owing to reasons not to be comprehended by the public, the woodsmen of both operators had struck simultaneously and left the woods.