“As for the fire, it was an accident. McLeod? Well, McLeod tells me that you ambushed him and held him up and threatened to kill him. By way of a joke, after that, he ran off with your canoe and hid it a couple of miles down the river. Didn’t you find it again?”
Tom listened in absolute disbelief.
“Anyhow, you’ve got no sort of right to take out this timber,” he said. “It belongs—if it belongs to anybody—to the man who cut it.”
“And he’s dead. Exactly,” said Harrison. “You see, I took the precaution of going into all that matter long ago. Daniel Wilson died ten years ago, but his son is living in Montreal. This son is Wilson’s only heir. I went to see him, and came to an arrangement. I’ll show you.”
Harrison opened a small box, and after rummaging through it, he produced a large folded document, glanced at it, and handed it to Tom.
It was worded in legal phraseology, hard to comprehend; but the boy made out that Henry Wilson, whose name was undersigned, transferred to A. C. Harrison all his rights in a certain quantity of walnut timber supposed to be in or about Coboconk Lake, formerly the property of the father of the said Henry Wilson.
“I get it out on a basis of paying him a royalty of ten dollars a thousand feet, as you see,” said Harrison. “I paid him a hundred dollars down. It was a gamble, for I wasn’t sure; but I’d been up here before, and I had an idea of where that old raft might have drifted. But you see it’s all straight and aboveboard—”
Tom was hardly listening. The paper appeared to be correctly drawn up, properly signed, and witnessed. He could not doubt its validity. There was nothing to do, then. Harrison had out-manœvered him at every point. The game was up.
He turned almost sick with chagrin and defeat. He threw down the paper and stood up, turning away without a word.
“Hold on. Where are you going?” cried Harrison.