"

"There wasn't nothin' said about moppin'," grinned Scattergood, "and
there wasn't nothin' said about hardware and harness and farm
implements, neither. If you don't b'lieve me, jest read the agreement.
What I'm doin', neighbors, is git this place cleaned out to put in the
finest cash, cut-price, up-to-date hardware store in the state. And
thank you, neighbors. You've done right kindly by a stranger...."

To this point the history of Scattergood Baines has been for the most
part legendary; now we begin to encounter him in the public records, for
deeds, mortgages, and the like begin to appear with his name upon them.
His history becomes authentic.

Seven hundred and fifty dollars is not much when put into hardware, but
Scattergood had no intention of putting even that into a stock of goods.
He had a notion that the right kind of man, with five hundred dollars,
could get credit to twice that amount, and as for farm machinery, he
could sell by catalogue or on commission. His suspicion was proven to be
fact.

But it was not in Scattergood to sit idle while he waited for his stock
to arrive. Coldriver doubtless thought him idle, but he was studying the
locality and the river with the eye of a commander who knew this was to
be his battlefield. What Scattergood wanted now was to place himself
astride Coldriver Valley, somewhere below the village, so that he could
control the upper reaches of the stream. It was not difficult to find
such a location. It lay three miles below town, at the junction of the
north and south branches of Coldriver. The juncture was in a big,
marshy, untillable flat, from which hills rose abruptly. From the
easterly end of the flat the augmented river squeezed in a roaring
rapids through a sort of bottle neck.

Scattergood stood on the hillside and looked upon this with satisfied
eye.

"A dam across that bottle neck," he said to himself, "will flood that
flat. Reg'lar reservoy. Millpond. Git a twenty-foot fall here easy,
maybe more. Calc'late that'll run about any mill folks'll want to build.
And," he scratched his head as a sort of congratulation to it for its
efficiency, "I can't study out how anybody's agoin' to git logs past
here without dickerin' with the man who owns the dam...." Plenty of
water twelve months a year to give free power; a flat made to order for
reservoir or log pond; a complete and effective blockade of both
branches of the river which came down from a country richly timbe