"I'll show him one of these days I ain't afraid of him," answered the boy, so quickly that Hurley laughed.
"Hurry along, then," he said. "An' if ye git back in time I've a notion to send ye out after a pa'tridge. Saginaw says yer quite some sport with a rifle."
"That's the way to work it, kid," commended Slue Foot, as Connie bent over the fastenings of his snow-shoes. "I'll growl an' you sass every time we're ketched together. 'Twasn't that I'd of made ye hike way up to my camp jest fer to copy them names, but the time's came fer to begin to git lined up on shadin' the cut, an' we jest nachelly had to git away from the office. Anyways it won't hurt none to git a good trail broke between the camps."
"There ain't any chance of getting caught at this graft, is there?" asked the boy.
"Naw; that is, 'tain't one chanct in a thousan'. Course, it stan's to reason if a man's playin' fer big stakes he's got to take a chanct. Say, where'd you learn to walk on rackets? You said you hadn't never be'n in the woods before."
"I said I'd never worked in the woods—I've hunted some."
The talk drifted to other things as the two plodded along the tote road, but once within the little office at Camp Two, Slue Foot plunged immediately into his scheme. "It's like this: The sawyers gits paid by the piece—the more they cut, the more pay they git. The logs is scaled after they're on the skidways. Each pair of sawyers has their mark they put on the logs they cut, an' the scaler puts down every day what each pair lays down. Then every night he turns in the report to you, an' you copy it in the log book. The total cut has got to come out right—the scaler knows all the time how many feet is banked on the rollways. I've got three pair of sawyers that's new to the game, an' they hain't a-goin' to cut as much as the rest. The scaler won't never look at your books, 'cause it hain't none of his funeral if the men don't git what's a-comin' to 'em. He keeps his own tally of the total cut. Same with the walkin' boss—that's Hurley. All he cares is to make a big showin'. He'll have an eye on the total cut, an' he'll leave it to Saginaw an' me to see that the men gits what's comin' to 'em in our own camps. Now, what you got to do is to shade a little off each pair of sawyers' cut an' add it onto what's turned in fer them three pair I told you about. Then, in the spring, when these birds cashes their vouchers in town, I'm right there to collect the overage."
"But," objected Connie, "won't the others set up a howl? Surely, they will know that these men are not cutting as much as they are."
"How they goin' to find out what vouchers them six turns in? They hain't a-goin' to show no one their vouchers."