Johnnie Bones came home next noon and reported to Scattergood that he had been partially successful.

“I couldn’t get all of that flat,” he said.  “Somebody’s been buying on the quiet.  Three strips from the river to the hill were not to be had, but I bought four strips, two at the ends and two between the pieces I couldn’t get.”

“Better call it a side of bacon, Johnnie.  Strip of fat and strip of lean.  Dunno but it’s better as it lays.  Hear anythin’ about the Goodhue tract?”

“Somebody’s been cruising it for a month back—­without a brass band.”

“Um!...  Send a wire, Johnnie.  Lumberman’s Trust Company, Boston.  Set price Goodhue tract....”

Johnnie telephoned the wire.  Two hours later the answer came, “Goodhue tract no longer in our hands.”

“Did you ever wonder, Johnnie, why I never got int’rested into that Goodhue timber?”

Johnnie shook his head.

“Because,” said Scattergood, “you got to log it by rail.  Forty thousand acres of it, and no stream runnin’ through it big enough to drive logs down....  But I got an idee, Johnnie, that loggin’ by rail can be done economical.  Know who bought that timber?”

“No.”

“McKettrick of the Seaboard Box and Paper Company, biggest concern of the kind in America.  Calc’late they’ll be makin’ pulp here to ship to their paper mills.  Calculate I’ll give ’em a commodity rate of around seven cents to the G. and B. Johnnie, our orchard’s goin’ to begin givin’ a crop.  That’ll give us sixteen dollars and eighty cents for haulin’ a minimum car of twenty-four thousand.  And this hain’t goin’ to be any one-car mill, neither.  Five cars a day’ll be increasin’ our revenue twenty-four thousand three hunderd dollars a year—­on outgoin’ freight.  Then there’s incomin’ freight to figger.  All we got to do is set still and take that.  Beauty of controllin’ the transportation of a region.  But it seems like we ought to git more out of it than that—­if we stir around some.  Especial when you come to consider that McKettrick and Castle is flyin’ at each other’s throats.  It’s a situation, Johnnie, that man owes a duty to himself to take advantage of.”

Scattergood went back to his hardware store and seated himself on the piazza.  Presently a team drove up from down the valley and a tall, gaunt individual, with hair of the color of a dead leaf, alighted.

“I was told I could find a man named Scattergood Baines here,” he said.

“You kin,” Scattergood replied.

“Where is he?”

“Sich as he is,” said Scattergood, “you see him.”

The man looked from Scattergood’s shoeless feet and white woolen socks to Scattergood’s shabby, baggy trousers, and then on upward, by slow and disapproving degrees, to Scattergood’s guileless face, and there the scrutiny stopped.

“Some mistake,” he said; “I want the owner of the Coldriver Valley Railroad.”