"Did you ever wonder, Johnnie, why I never got int'rested into that Goodhue timber?"
Johnnie shook his head.
"Because," said Scattergood, "you got to log it by rail. Forty thousand acres of it, and no stream runnin' through it big enough to drive logs down.... But I got an idee, Johnnie, that loggin' by rail can be done economical. Know who bought that timber?"
"No."
"McKettrick of the Seaboard Box and Paper Company, biggest concern of the kind in America. Calc'late they'll be makin' pulp here to ship to their paper mills. Calculate I'll give 'em a commodity rate of around seven cents to the G. and B. Johnnie, our orchard's goin' to begin givin' a crop. That'll give us sixteen dollars and eighty cents for haulin' a minimum car of twenty-four thousand. And this hain't goin' to be any one-car mill, neither. Five cars a day'll be increasin' our revenue twenty-four thousand three hunderd dollars a year—on outgoin' freight. Then there's incomin' freight to figger. All we got to do is set still and take that. Beauty of controllin' the transportation of a region. But it seems like we ought to git more out of it than that—if we stir around some. Especial when you come to consider that McKettrick and Castle is flyin' at each other's throats. It's a situation, Johnnie, that man owes a duty to himself to take advantage of."
Scattergood went back to his hardware store and seated himself on the piazza. Presently a team drove up from down the valley and a tall, gaunt individual, with hair of the color of a dead leaf, alighted.
"I was told I could find a man named Scattergood Baines here," he said.
"You kin," Scattergood replied.
"Where is he?"
"Sich as he is," said Scattergood, "you see him."