“You have, eh? Your wire sounded mysterious. Something in this, Armstrong?”
“I think it’s worth looking into,” said Mr. Armstrong, laughing.
“If you’ve got all that, I guess the bank can carry you,” continued the financier. “Of course we don’t want to push Matt Jackson into bankruptcy. I guess anyway we’d better call the meeting postponed.”
That meeting was never held. Tom held a long conference with the lawyer and the banker that evening, going home at last to his deserted house, to tumble into bed and sleep like one dead till the middle of the next forenoon. Late that day a telegram arrived from the north:
Boss waked up and doing good. Doctor says no danger. Raft safe.
Lynch.
Tom had another long talk over a dinner-table with Armstrong that evening, finding the lawyer more human than he had ever considered him before. The next morning he left for the Coboconk lakes again, accompanied by a representative of the Erie Bank.
They found Mr. Jackson conscious and much recovered, weak indeed, but eager to be out again. The skull had not been fractured; he had suffered merely a concussion, and had been half drowned into the bargain, and when Tom and his companion arrived he insisted on sitting up and talking business.
The big raft still lay behind its boom in the northern bay, and was an imposing sight, even after all the damage it had suffered. Nearly a third of it had broken away in the storm. Some of the cribs had remained afloat; some had gone ashore; and Lynch had been energetically picking up everything that could be salvaged. Much of the walnut had been spilled off the loose cribs, but altogether Lynch estimated that they still had a good hundred and twenty thousand feet.
At any rate the sight of the timber so impressed the bank representative that he willingly agreed to “carry” the business a little longer. All that remained was to get the timber out. Mr. Jackson had originally thought of sawing it up at Oakley, but finally decided to team the logs out from that place and ship it to Toronto, where the precious wood could be more carefully handled.