Bat’s doubt had been carefully calculated.  He knew his man.  And just now as he awaited the explosion he looked for, his thoughts went back to a scene he had once had with a half drunken machine-minder whom he had had to pay off.  The man had epitomised the chief engineer’s qualities and character, as those who encountered his authority understood them, in a few lurid, illuminating phrases.  “You know,” he had said, “that guy ain’t a man.  No, sir.  He’s the mush-fed image of a penitentiary boss.  I guess he’d set the grease box of a driving shaft hot with a look.  His temper ’ud burn holes in sheet iron.  As for work—­work?  Holy Mackinaw!  I’ve worked hired man to a French Canuk mossback which don’t leave a feller the playtime of a nigger slave, but that hell-hired Scotch machine boss sets me yearnin’ for that mossback’s wage like a bull-pup chasin’ offal.  I tell you right here if that guy don’t quit his notions there’ll be murder done.  Bloody murder!  An’ it’s a God’s sure thing when that happens he’ll freeze to death in hell.  It don’t rile me a thing to be told the things he guesses my mother was.  Maybe that’s a matter of opinion, and, anyway, she’s mixin’ with a crop of angels who don’t figger to have no truck with Scotch machine bosses.  I guess a sight of his flea-bitten features ’ud set ’em seein’ things so they wouldn’t rec’nise their harps from frypans, and they’d moult feathers till you wouldn’t know it from a snowfall on Labrador.  But when he mixes his notions of my ma with ‘lazy’!  Lazy!  Lazy!  Gee!  Why, if I signed in a half hour late from that bum suttler’s canteen, I guess it was only the time it took me digestin’ two quarts of the gut-wash they hand out there in the hope you won’t know it from beer.  No, sir, ‘lazy son-of-a-bitch’ from that guy is the talk no decent citizen with a bunch of guts is goin’ to stand for.”

Skert Lawton was known for a red-hot “burner,” a “nigger driver.”  No doubt he was all this in addition to his brilliant attainments as an engineer.  But the methods he applied to others he applied to himself.  And the whole of him, brain and body, was for the enterprise they were all engaged in.  Bat had intended to goad the demon of obstinate energy which possessed the man, and he succeeded.

Skert flung out his hand in a comprehensive gesture.

“Hell!” he cried.  “That’s no sort of talk anyway.  I’ve been weeks on this thing.  And I’ve got it to the last fraction.  Big notion?  Of course it is.  Aren’t we mostly concerned with big notions?  Here, what are you asking?  An inland boom with capacity for anything over a million cords.  Well?  It’s damn ridiculous talking the size of the notion.  This hollow is fixed right.  Its bed is ten feet below the bed of the river.  It’s surrounded with a natural ridge on all sides a hundred and fifty feet high.  There’s a quarter mile below the hollow and the river bank, and the new mill extensions are just to the east of this ridge.