The forester was studying his expression closely. "What's the difficulty, Charley?" he asked.
"I told you I never trusted Lumley," he burst out. "Just look here."
He laid his figures beside Lumley's. Mr. Marlin ran his eye over them. At first he, too, seemed puzzled. Then his face grew black as a thundercloud.
"Are you certain that you know how to scale a log right, Charley?" he asked.
"Absolutely, Mr. Marlin."
"How do you estimate a log?"
Charley got his rule and laid it across the end of an unburned log in his fireplace. It was ten inches in diameter.
"If that were a twelve-foot log," he said, consulting the scale, "it would have three board feet in it. If it were sixteen feet long, it would have six feet."
"Absolutely correct, Charley. Did you measure those logs that way yesterday?"
"Yes, sir."