“You guessed right the first time.”
“I knew it,” Mac exclaimed. “I’ve been thinking about him all day. What is he up to now?”
“Day before yesterday he tried to get a man to set fire to these camps.”
“Set fire to ’em!” Mac almost shouted. “The dirty scoundrel!”
“And to-night,” Scott continued, “I came by his house and happened to see him talking to the man you fired this morning.”
Mac gave an angry snort of disgust. “That’s a fine howdy-do. A man who wants to find somebody to burn down the camp and a drunken lumberjack I fired this morning. Couldn’t find a better combination than that in all North Carolina.”
“I came right on down here to warn you, because I thought you would want to put on a guard,” Scott said.
“Put on a guard nothing,” Mac exclaimed contemptuously. “We’ll go up there and clean them out. The boys would enjoy it and I can have the crew out in ten minutes.”
“I know the men could do it, Mac, and would probably enjoy it, but it would stir up too much of a row. If it were just those two it might be all right, but he is a leader of a big gang and we would have to fight all the people on that side of the mountain.”
“Well, we can do that, too,” Mac answered doggedly. “Nobody ever burned my camps yet and nobody’s going to.”