"Maybe we can buy him off."
"Hanged if I'll do that—we'll chase him off. Look here—he's got to handle our logs. If he can't handle them we've got a right to put on our own crew and drive them down—and charge back to him what it costs us. Get the idea?"
"Not exactly."
"We deliver the logs as specified in the spring. Let him start his drive. Then, I figure, he'll have some trouble with his men, and most likely men he don't have trouble with will get into a row with lumberjacks going out of camp. See? Men of his that we can't handle we'll pitch into the river. Then we'll take charge with our men and make the drive. On top of that we'll sue Scattergood for thirty or forty cents a thousand—extra cost we've been put to by his inability to handle the drive. That'll put a crimp in him—and if we keep after him hot and heavy it won't take long to drive him out of the valley."
"Don't believe he's dangerous, anyhow. That last deal was bullhead luck."
"Yes, but he's stirring around. We don't want anybody poking in. There's a heap of money in this valley for us, if we can keep it to ourselves, and the sooner the idea gets abroad that it isn't healthful to butt in, the better."
"Guess you're right."
If Scattergood could have heard this conversation perhaps he would not have been so gayly partaking of the softer joys of life. For that is what Scattergood was doing. He had polished up his buggy, put his new harness on his horse, and was driving out to make a social call. Not only that, but it was a social call upon a lady!
Scattergood was lonely sometimes. In one of his moments of loneliness it had occurred to him that a great many men had wives, and that wives were, undoubtedly, a remarkably effective insurance against that ailment.
"I gather," he said, in the course of a casual conversation with Sam Kettleman, the grocer, "that wives is sometimes inconvenient and sometimes tryin' on the temper, but on the whole they're returnin' income on the investment."