This was important.  First, the gentlemen named were no friends of Scattergood’s by reason of having underestimated that fleshy individual to their financial detriment in the matter of a certain dam and boom company, of which Scattergood was now sole owner.  Second, because it presaged active lumbering operations.  Third, because, in Scattergood’s safe were ironclad contracts with both of them whereby the said dam and boom company should receive sixty cents a thousand feet for driving their logs down the improved river.

And fourth—­the fourth brought Scattergood’s active toes to a rest.  Fourth, it meant that Crane and Keith would be building the largest sawmill—­the only sawmill of consequence—­that the valley had seen.

It was an attribute of Scattergood’s peculiar genius that even after you had encountered him once, and come out the worse for it, you still rated him as a fatuous, guileless mound of flesh.  You did not credit his successes to astuteness, but to blundering luck.  Another point also should be noted:  If Scattergood were hunting bear he gave it out that his game was partridge.  He would hunt partridge industriously and conspicuously until men’s minds were turned quite away from the subject of bear.  Then suddenly he would shift shotgun for rifle and come home with a bearskin in the wagon.  Probably he would bring partridge, too, for he never neglected by-products.

“Them fellows,” said he to himself, referring to Messrs. Crane and Keith, “hain’t aimin’ nor wishin’ to pay me no sixty cents a thousand for drivin’ their logs....  I figger they calculate to cut about ten million feet.  That’ll be six thousand dollars.  Profit maybe two thousand.  Don’t see as I kin afford to lose it, seems as though.”

On the river below Coldriver village were three hamlets each consisting of a general store, a church, and a few scattered dwellings.  These villages were the supply centers for the mountain farms that lay behind them.  Necessity had located them, for nowhere else along the valley was there flat land upon which even the tiniest village could find a resting place.  These were Bailey, Tupper Falls, and Higgins’s Bridge.  In common with Coldriver village their communication with the world was by means of a stage line consisting of two so-called stages, one of which left Coldriver in the morning on the downward trip, the other of which left the mouth of the valley on the upward trip.  There was also one freight wagon.

The morning following Scattergood’s second anniversary in the region, he boarded the stage, occupying so much space therein that a single fare failed utterly to show a profit to the stage line, and alighted at Bailey.  He went directly to the store, where no one was to be found save sharp-featured Mrs. Bailey, wife of the proprietor.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” said Scattergood, politely.  “Husband hain’t in?”

“Up the brook, catchin’ a mess of trout,” she responded, shortly.  “He’s always catchin’ a mess of trout, or huntin’ a deer or a partridge or somethin’.  If you’re ever aimin’ to see Jim Bailey here, you want to git around afore daylight or after dark.”