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 guileles