“Not in the least.”

“Lawyer’s still acrost the street.”

So Scattergood and Mr. Blossom went across the street and up the narrow stairs to Lawyer Norton’s office, where a contract was drafted and signed, obligating Scattergood to deliver to the Higgins’s Bridge Pulp Company twenty-five thousand cords of pulp, on or before May 1st, payment to be made on delivery.  Mr. Blossom went away wearing a satisfied expression, and in the course of the day sent to Crane & Keith a brief message, a message of two words.  “He bit,” was the telegram.

Scattergood went back to his chair, and presently might have been seen to unlace his shoes absent-mindedly.  For an hour he sat there, twiddling his bare toes.  Then he got up, jerked Mr. Blossom’s old jackknife from the post where it had been abandoned, and pocketed it.

“If nothin’ else happens,” he said to himself, “I’m figgered to make a profit of sixty cents and a tradin’ knife.”

There followed a very busy fall and winter for Scattergood.  Not that he neglected his hardware store, but from its porch, and later from a post beside its big stove, he recruited men for his camps and directed the labor of cutting and piling pulpwood along the banks of Coldriver.  Also, from time to time, he visited various banks to borrow the money necessary to carry on the operation, sometimes on notes and collateral, sometimes on timber mortgages.  The sum of his borrowing mounted and mounted, until, before the arrival of spring, his credit had been strained to the uttermost.

Nor had the pulp company been idle.  Its new mills had arisen beside the river at Higgins’s Bridge, machinery had been installed, and the little hamlet was beginning to speculate in town lots and to look forward to unexampled prosperity.

But before the ice was out of the river disquieting rumors began to breathe out of Higgins’s Bridge.  They were the meerest vapor of conjecture at first, apparently based upon no evidence whatever, but friends delighted to convey them to Scattergood, as friends always delight to perform such a disagreeable duty.

“Hear things hain’t goin’ right down to the new pulp mill,” said Deacon Pettybone, one bitterly cold afternoon, when he came into Scattergood’s store to thaw the icicles out of his sparse beard.

“Do tell,” said Scattergood.

“Be perty bad for you if they was to go wrong, wouldn’t it?”

“Perty bad, Deacon.”

“’Most ruin you, wouldn’t it?  Clean you out?  Leave you with nothin’?”

“Hain’t mortgaged my health.  Hain’t mortgaged my brains.  Have them left, Deacon.  Don’t figger I’m clean bankrupt till them two is gone.”

But it was to be noticed that Scattergood toasted his bare toes a great deal during the ensuing days.  He scarcely put on his shoes except when he was going out to wallow through the drifts; and, as Coldriver knew, when Scattergood waggled his bare toes he was struggling with a problem.