“Foster Wait shot my daughter in cold blood just fifteen years ago, shot her just to keep the feud from dying out. He brought it to life again,” he concluded grimly. “Now it will live till one of us dies.”
They both sat motionless for a minute staring at the opposite mountain in silence. The old man was choked with his own suppressed fury. Scott was awed by the significance this statement gave to the conversation which he had overheard in the woods the day before. What if this cold-blooded murderer should shoot Vic this time to keep the feud alive?
He knew that he dared say nothing more to Jarred. In fact, he could think of little more to say. “Thank you for your confidence in me, Mr. Morgan,” he said sincerely. “I promise not to mention the matter again.”
Jarred did not seem to hear him. His eyes were still fixed on the opposite mountain, and when Scott looked back from the turn in the road he had not moved.
CHAPTER XVII
HOPWOOD TAKES A TRIP
For the next few days Scott was too busy to think anything of Foster Wait’s possible revenge. In fact he almost forgot the feud altogether. The time for the return of bids had come and he had been awarded the contract. He had wired in his resignation to Washington and was once more in the thick of a logging job.
He wired to Asheville where he had already made his preliminary arrangements, and in two days carloads of men, lumber and supplies began to arrive. He had hired a friend of his old foreman to boss the job, another Scotchman, MacAndrews, who knew the country and the logging methods. Camp buildings of rough lumber sprang up like mushrooms in the valley near the railroad tracks, and the skid roads began to creep slowly up the mountain in the shallow draws toward the ridge.
The log chute was of particular interest to Scott because he had never seen one. In that particular place there was a small side valley, larger than most of the shallow draws, and the log chute was built along the little stream in the bottom of it. It consisted of two strings of logs laid side by side on short ties and hewed flat on the inside to form a rough trough. The logs were peeled and rolled into it far up on the mountain and gravity brought them down with the speed of a toboggan.
Near the bottom of it they built a contraption which they called a bear trap to break the speed of the logs before they came out on to the pile. It was a heavy log, one end of which was raised on a tripod over the chute while the heavy butt end rested in the chute. Scott never tired of watching the great logs rushing down at tremendous speed only to butt this big swinging log high in the air and slide gently out of the chute, their force all spent.
Every now and then the silence of the valley was broken by a dull boom as the long saws chewed their way steadily through the great trunks and the majestic monarchs of the forest plunged headlong down the side of the mountain over which they had stood guard for centuries. And down the steep skid roads in the shallow draws the teams were hauling long trains of logs chained end to end.