“Well, I’ll try to tell you the whole story. The trouble started about two years ago. The Quiller Lumber Company had bought a big bunch of pine and cypress timber up near the edge of the big swamp. They are a small concern and do not have a very large crew. Of course, that means slow work and easy checking for us. Their slowness came to be a standing joke with the ranger up there who looks after the scaling. He used to say in his diary every now and then, ‘Quiller got down another tree to-day.’
“They had been at it about six months when the foreman came down to see me. ‘Have you noticed anything peculiar about our scale?’ he asked. ‘Noticed there has not been much to scale,’ I told him. ‘That’s just it,’ he said, ‘checked up on the stumps any?’ I explained to him that we seldom did that till a considerable quantity had been cut.
“‘Well, I have,’ he said, ‘and more than half of the stuff we have cut ain’t there.’
“He went on to tell me that he had had a night watchman on the boom for two weeks and tried in every way to check the thing up, but the logs kept disappearing just the same. A lot of his niggers got superstitious about it and quit the job.”
“How do they handle their logs?” Scott asked.
“Skid them down to the edge of the big swamp on high wheels and shove them into a bag boom. Then they raft them and float them out into the river.”
“Do they keep them in the boom long?” Scott was thinking again of the story of the sunken logs.
“Oh, they are not in the bottom of the swamp if that is what you are driving at. Murphy has prodded the bottom of that pond with a pike pole a dozen times.”
“Is there a channel through to the river or can they take them out anywhere?”
“I’ve hunted all over there myself and I cannot find a place where they could take them out except through that one channel.”