gentlemen named Crane and Keith had pooled their timber holdings on the
east and west branches of Coldriver, and had filed papers for the
incorporation of the Coldriver Lumber Company.

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