“Perhaps. Nevertheless, if I can demonstrate to a certain party that it will not cost more than three quarters of a million, he'll loan me the money.”
The old man shook his head. “I don't believe it, Bryce. Who's the crazy man?”
“His name is Gregory. He's Scotch.”
“Now I know he's crazy. When he hands you the money, you'll find he's talking real money but thinking of Confederate greenbacks. For a sane Scotchman to loan that much money without collateral security would be equivalent to exposing his spinal cord and tickling it with a rat-tail file.”
Bryce laughed. “Pal,” he declared, “if you and I have any brains, they must roll around in our skulls like buckshot in a tin pan. Here we've been sitting for three months, and twiddling our thumbs, or lying awake nights trying to scheme a way out of our difficulties, when if we'd had the sense that God gives geese we would have solved the problem long ago and ceased worrying. Listen, now, with all your ears. When Bill Henderson wanted to build the logging railroad which he afterward sold to Pennington, and which Pennington is now using as a club to beat our brains out, did he have the money to build it?”
“No.”
“Where did he get it?”
“I loaned it to him. He only had about eight miles of road to build then, so I could afford to accommodate him.”
“How did he pay you back?”
“Why, he gave me a ten-year contract for hauling our logs at a dollar and a half a thousand feet, and I merely credited his account with the amount of the freight-bills he sent me until he'd squared up the loan, principal and interest.”