up and tells Col. Gid Ward that a concern of city men is going to put a
railroad in across his land--that's all!"

"Gid Ward has always backed everybody off the trail into the bushes
round here" said Seth. "But he's up against a different crowd now."

"Do ye think, in the first place, that Colonel Gid is going to sell 'em
any right o' way across Poquette?" asked the postmaster. "He owns the
whole tract there."

"Oh, there's ways of getting it," replied Seth. "Let lawyers alone for
that when they're paid. If Gid don't sell, they can condemn and take."

In a week a portion of Seth's prediction concerning lawyers was
verified.

Mr. Bevan, tall and thin and sallow, stepped off the train at Sunkhaze.
He was a prominent attorney in one of the principal cities of the state,
and served as clerk of this new corporation.

When he heard that Col. Gideon Ward was fifty miles up the West Branch,
looking after a timber operation on Number 8, Range 23, he borrowed
leggings, shoe-pacs and an overcoat and hastened on by means of a
tote-team.

A week later, silent and grim and pinched with cold, he unrolled himself
from buffalo-robes and took the train at Sunkhaze. The postmaster and
station-agent gave him several opportunities to relate the outcome of
his negotiations, but the attorney was taciturn.

The first news came down two week later by Miles McCormick, a swamper
on Ward's Number 8 operation. The man had a gash on his cheek and a big
purple swelling under one eye. When a man of Ward's crew came down from
the woods marked in that manner, it was not necessary for him to say
that he had been discharged by the choleric tyrant who ruled the forest
forces from Chamberlain to Seguntiway. The only inquiry was as to method
and provocation.

"He comes along to me as I was choppin'," related Miles to the Sunkhaze
postmaster, "and he yowls, 'Git to goin' there, man, git to goin'!'
'An',' says I, 'sure, an' I'll not yank the ax back till it's done
cuttin'.' An' then he" Miles put his finger carefully against the
puffiness under his eye, "he hit me."

"Was there a tall stranger come up on the tote-team two weeks or so
ago?" asked the postmaster.

"There were," Miles replied, listlessly, and intent on his own troubles.

"Hear anything special about his business?"

"No. The old man took the stranger into the wangun camp, where it was
private, and they talked. None of us heard 'em."

"And then the stranger went away, hey?" "Oh,