and improving the river. He approached it sadly.

"Might as well save what I kin out of the wreck," he said to himself,
and quietly manufactured a dummy contracting company to whom he let the
entire job for a lump sum of thirty-eight thousand seven hundred
dollars. The dummy contractor was Scattergood Baines.

The dam was completed, booms and cribbing placed, ledges blasted out
well within the six months' period set for those operations. Every
thirty days Scattergood, in the name of the dummy contractor, was paid
eighty per cent of his estimates, and at the completion of the work he
received the remainder of the whole sum.

"I wouldn't 'a' done it to them boys," he said, as he surveyed a deposit
of upward of seven thousand dollars, his profit on the transaction, "if
it hadn't 'a' been they organized to cheat me out of my river. I
calc'late in the circumstances, though, I'm most entitled to what I kin
salvage out of the wreck."

Now the Coldriver Dam and Boom Company, Scattergood Baines president and
manager, was ready for business, which was to take the logs of Messrs.
Crane and Keith and drive them down the river at the rate of sixty cents
per thousand feet. It was ready and eager, and so expressed itself in
quaintly worded communications from Baines to those gentlemen. But no
logs appeared to be driven.

"Jest like I said," Scattergood told himself, and, the day being hot and
the road dusty, he removed his shoes and rested his sweltering bulk in
the shade to consider it.