“This new railroad idea ought to hit him all right, then,” remarked Seth, the guide.
“Well,” remarked the postmaster, “I'd just like to be round—far enough off so's the chips and splinters wouldn't hit me—when some one steps up and tells Col. Gid Ward that a concern of city men is going to put a railroad in across his land—that's all!”
“Gid Ward has always backed everybody off the trail into the bushes round here” said Seth. “But he's up against a different crowd now.”
“Do ye think, in the first place, that Colonel Gid is going to sell 'em any right o' way across Poquette?” asked the postmaster. “He owns the whole tract there.”
“Oh, there's ways of getting it,” replied Seth. “Let lawyers alone for that when they're paid. If Gid don't sell, they can condemn and take.”
In a week a portion of Seth's prediction concerning lawyers was verified.
Mr. Bevan, tall and thin and sallow, stepped off the train at Sunkhaze. He was a prominent attorney in one of the principal cities of the state, and served as clerk of this new corporation.
When he heard that Col. Gideon Ward was fifty miles up the West Branch, looking after a timber operation on Number 8, Range 23, he borrowed leggings, shoe-pacs and an overcoat and hastened on by means of a tote-team.
A week later, silent and grim and pinched with cold, he unrolled himself from buffalo-robes and took the train at Sunkhaze. The postmaster and station-agent gave him several opportunities to relate the outcome of his negotiations, but the attorney was taciturn.
The first news came down two week later by Miles McCormick, a swamper on Ward's Number 8 operation. The man had a gash on his cheek and a big purple swelling under one eye. When a man of Ward's crew came down from the woods marked in that manner, it was not necessary for him to say that he had been discharged by the choleric tyrant who ruled the forest forces from Chamberlain to Seguntiway. The only inquiry was as to method and provocation.