mile, wouldn't it, eh?"

"Yes," said Keith, laughing at Scattergood's ignorance; "but how about
transportation from your mill to the railroad? We can't drive cut
lumber."

"Course not," said Scattergood, "but this valley's goin' to open up.
It's startin'. There's only one way to open a valley, and that's to run
a railroad up it.... Narrow-gauge 'u'd do here. Carry mostly lumber, but
passengers, too."

"Thinking of building one?" asked Crane, almost laughing in
Scattergood's face.

"Thinkin' don't cost nobody anythin'," said Scattergood. "Ever take a
look at that charter of mine?"

"No."

"I'll let you read it over a bit. Maybe you'll git a idea from it."

He extracted the parchment from his safe, and spread it before them.
"Kind of look careful along toward the end--in the tail feathers of it,
so to speak," he advised.

They did so, and Crane looked up at the fat hardware man with eyes that
were not quite so contemptuous. "By George!" he said, "this thing's a
charter for a railroad down the valley, too."

"Uh-huh!" said Scattergood. "Dunno's the boys quite see what it was all
about, but they calculated to please me, so they put it through jest as
it stood. Mighty nice fellers up to the legislature."

"Pretty far in the future," said Keith, "and mighty expensive."

"Maybe not so far," said Scattergood, "and I could make a darn good
start narrow-gaugin' it with a hunderd thousand."

"Which you've got handy for use," said Crane.

"There _is_ that much money," said Scattergood, "and if there is, why,
it kin be got."

"Let's get back to the river, now," said Keith. "If we're going to start
lumbering in a year, say, we've got to have the river in shape. Take
quite some time to get it cleared and dammed and boomed."

"Six months," said Scattergood.

"Cost a right smart pile."

"The work I'm figgerin' on would come to about thirty-odd thousand."

"Which you haven't got."

"Somebody has," said Scattergood.

"_We_ have," said Crane. "That's why we came to you--and with a
proposition. You've grabbed this thing off, but you can't hog it,
because you haven't the money to put it through. Our offer is this: You
put in your locations and your charter against our money. We'll finance
it. Your enterprise entitles you to control. We won't dispute that. You
can have fifty-one per cent of the stock for what you've contributed. We
take the rest for financing. We're known, and can get money."

"How you figger to wo