rk it?"

"We'll bond for forty thousand dollars. Keith and I can place the bonds.
That'll give us money to go ahead."

Scattergood reached down and took off a huge shoe. Usually he thought
more accurately when his feet were unconfined. "That means we'd sort of
mortgage the whole thing, eh?"

"That's the idea."

"And if we didn't pay interest on the bonds, why, the fellers that had
'em could foreclose?"

"But we needn't worry about that."

"Not," said Scattergood, "if you fellers sign a contract with the dam
and boom company to give them the exclusive job of drivin' all your
timber at, say, sixty cents a thousand feet of logs. And if you'd stick
a clause in that contract that you'd begin cuttin' within twelve months
from date."

"Sure we'd do that," said Keith. "To our advantage as much as to yours."

"To be sure," said Scattergood.

"It's a deal, then?"

"Far's I'm concerned," said Scattergood, slipping his foot inside his
shoe, "it is."

That afternoon, the papers having been signed and the deal consummated,
Scattergood sat cogitating.

"I've been done," he said to himself, solemnly, "accordin' to them
fellers' notion. They come and seen me, and done me. They planned out
how they'd do it, and I didn't never suspect a thing. Uh-huh! Seems like
I was unfortunate, just gettin' a start in life like I be.... Bonds,
says they. Uh-huh! They'll place 'em, and place 'em handy. First
int'rest day there won't be no int'rest, and them bonds'll be
foreclosed--and where'll I be? Mighty ingenious fellers, Crane and
Keith.... And I up and walked right into it like a fly into a molasses
barrel. Them fellers," he said, even more somberly, "come here
calc'latin' to cheat me out of my river.... Me bein' jest a fat man
without no brains...."

Crane and Keith had left Scattergood the executive head of the new dam
and boom company, and had confided to him the task of building the dam
and improving the river. He approached it sadly.

"Might as well save what I kin out of the wreck," he said to himself,
and quietly manufactured a dummy contracting company to whom he let the
entire job for a lump sum of thirty-eight thousand seven hundred
dollars. The dummy contractor was Scattergood Baines.

The dam was completed, booms and cribbing placed, ledges blasted out
well within the six months' period set for those operations. Every
thirty days Scattergood, in the name of the dummy contractor, was paid
eighty per cent of his estim