SCOTT BURTON AND THE TIMBER THIEVES

“WE’VE GOT TO GET ’EM, I TELL YOU.”

CHAPTER I

Scott Burton sat on the porch of the little cabin on the edge of the forest and looked absently out across the wide beach at the restless waters of the Gulf of Mexico. No one ever would have guessed from his expression now how crazy he had been to see that gulf only the day before. He apparently did not see the water at all. The big waves boomed on the beach unheard and even the little oyster schooner, which glided across the picture on its way to port, failed to catch his attention. He had sat motionless for so long that a great big fox-squirrel, afraid but drawn on irresistibly by his curiosity, had crept nervously up within a few feet of him.

Suddenly Scott shook his head to rid himself of a bothersome fly and the frightened chatter of the squirrel as it whisked behind the nearest tree broke the spell. He gave the intruder a quick glance and turned his attention once more to the open letter which he held in his hand. He had read that letter dozens of times, in fact he knew every word on the typewritten page by heart, but he read it again now in the hope of finding some additional meaning between the lines.

“Your remarkable work in cleaning up the trouble with the sheepmen on the Cormorant Forest last summer has led us to select you for some special work of a rather delicate character on the Okalatchee. There have been some timber thieves at work on that forest for some time, and so far our officers have been unable to catch them or effectually put a stop to their work. It will be your particular duty to see that these thefts are stopped and the trespassers brought to justice.

“In order that you may have ample authority, you have been appointed deputy supervisor under Mr. Graham and will be given every possible assistance.

“You will report directly to this office.

No, he could not see any more in it, and yet it seemed mighty little to tell a man who had been looking forward to that letter for a week and had traveled two thousand miles to get it. He turned the paper over thoughtfully as though he hoped to find some further instructions on the back of it, and then proceeded to review once more the whole situation.

He had been fortunate enough to earn considerable distinction in Arizona, where he had been working as a patrolman, by clearing out a gang of grafters who had been running sheep on the Forest without a permit. This achievement had won for him the chance of an appointment as a ranger, but he had asked for the opportunity to obtain a little more experience as a patrolman before taking up a more responsible position. His request had been granted and he had spent the summer very profitably on the district he had cleaned up so creditably in the spring.

Suddenly, without the slightest warning, he had received a telegram from the Washington office.

“Report Okalatchee, Fla., at once. You will find instructions there.”

He had become attached to the Southwest and had looked forward contentedly to a permanent location there, but he was possessed of even more than the usual young man’s love of travel, and Florida had always been a country of his dreams, a country of fairy tales that he had hardly even dared hope to see. The sudden realization that he was actually going there had driven everything else from his mind, and an hour after he had received the message he was in the saddle on his way to town.

It was only when he was on the train speeding across the vast expanse of Texas, with plenty of opportunity to think, that he had begun to burn with a consuming curiosity to know what his instructions would be. The longer he had traveled the higher his air castles had grown and the more anxious he had become to see those instructions. By the time he had reached New Orleans he was in such a hurry that he could hardly enjoy his ten-hour wait there, though it was the first southern city he had ever been in and a place which he had always longed to see.

The sight of the tall palmetto palms and the moss-covered live oaks drove his imagination to even more fantastic efforts, and finally arrived in Okalatchee he had almost run directly from the train to the postoffice to get those precious instructions. And this letter was all that he had found. He had found that the supervisor’s headquarters were five miles away through the pine woods and the telephone gave him no answer. He had hired an old negro to drive him over. There was no one there, but the door was not locked and he had decided to stay there till some one came. He was not much better off than before he had obtained the letter.

“Well,” Scott thought, “there is nothing to do but wait till the supervisor turns up,” and he proceeded to investigate his new surroundings.

The little three-room cabin, built of rough lumber with battens over the cracks, was exactly like numbers of other ranger cabins he had seen, but its location had been selected with more than the usual attention to beauty and comfort. It nestled just within the edge of a very dense stand of tall, longleaf pines and the little front yard ran out to meet the broad sand beach. Flowerbeds of hibiscus and groups of oleanders lined the walk of crushed oyster shells, and plants with which Scott was entirely unfamiliar were scattered around in great profusion on either side of the cabin. It seemed to Scott as though a woman must have planned it all, for he could not imagine a man taking so much pains with the decoration of his home. He found himself thinking that it was no wonder this fellow had not caught the timber thieves.

Just to the west of the cabin a little creek bordered with titi and sweet jasmine wandered slowly out to meet the blue waters of the Gulf. It could not always have flowed as slowly as it did now, for some time in the past it had built quite a little delta which extended out in the form of a miniature cape, and was covered with a grove of tall, stately palmettos. Far out from the shore a long line of low-lying sand islands broke the horizon. It was certainly an ideal spot.

The interior of the cabin was quite as tastily equipped as the exterior, and the cupboard seemed to be stocked for a long siege. There was nothing lacking even to the luxuries. Scott smiled as he thought of his own bare little shack high up in the southern Rockies with the round bullet hole in the windowpane.

“I don’t care if that sissy supervisor does not show up for a week,” Scott grunted contentedly as he settled down in a comfortable steamer chair on the porch. No one could have asked for a better place to wait. But Scott was not much given to idle comfort, especially when his curiosity was aroused, and it usually was aroused about something. Just now he was almost wild to know something more of this new problem which he had been given to solve. He watched a little flock of sandpipers run along the smooth beach a way, following the very edge of a wave, but long before they had turned the point of the little palmetto cape he jumped restlessly from the chair and went into the cabin to study a map which he had noticed hanging on the wall.

It was a detailed map, showing the irregular boundary of Okalatchee forest and the different types of timber. It was a great sprawling tract of a million acres extending along the gulf to the river on the west, to the farm lands on the east, and north to the big swamp. It was covered with unfamiliar terms he had seen in books, but which had never seemed real to him before. He had always read them before as he would read the names in a fairy tale, and here he was in the very midst of them: pine ridge and cypress swamp, hardwood bottom and gum slough, low hammock and baygall, high hammock and cane break, turpentine orchards and stills.

He marveled at the great number of ridges shown in that flat country, and the many long, stringlike swamps which paralleled the river and the coast. And he wondered where in all that maze of unknown country the timber thieves whom he was supposed to catch were working. He noted several ranger stations shown on the map and wondered whether any of them were connected with the mystery as had been the case in the sheep business in the West, or whether there were really any thieves at all. He remembered reading a story in which men had been convicted on circumstantial evidence of stealing a raft of logs, and it was not till they had served a month in jail that the raft had been found in the bottom of the pond where it had been tied.

If only the supervisor, or any one else who could tell him anything about it, would come. He had not liked the “gum-shoe” game as he had called it when he had been obliged to try his hand at it in the West, but he found himself eager to get at it here because other men had tried it and failed. It seemed to him like a challenge and he was eager to accept it.

He pored over the map, studying the lay of the land and letting his imagination run wild. He had caught those thieves in forty different ways in at least a dozen different parts of the map when the failing light warned him that it was time to get supper and prepare for the night.

He had no instructions or invitation to make use of that cabin or the supplies in it, but there is a certain freemasonry among the men of the woods which was invitation enough for him. He had no hesitation in spreading his blankets on one of the beds and ransacking the cupboard for his supper. There was plenty to choose from and the wood was laid in the stove ready for the match. In half an hour he was sitting down to his lonely meal.

But it was not destined to be a lonely meal. Scott had hardly finished what he probably would have called his “first course,” when he heard a light step on the shell walk, a thud or two on the porch, and a man loomed big in the doorway.

CHAPTER II

Scott’s first impression was that this was the biggest man he had ever seen. He almost filled the doorway and the crown of his Stetson brushed the frame. His keen eye took in the interior of the cabin in one swift glance as he entered and then focused steadily on Scott, who had risen smiling to greet him.

“Mr. Burton, I presume?” he said, smiling pleasantly and extending a cordial hand. “My name is Graham. Glad to see you.”

“I am afraid that I am trespassing on your property, your provisions and your good nature,” Scott explained, “but I did not know what else to do.”

“Wasn’t anything else to do,” Mr. Graham said as he hung his hat carefully on a nail. “If you have just cooked supper enough for three I shall not say a word.”

Scott involuntarily glanced toward the door.

Mr. Graham noticed the look. “Oh, there isn’t anybody with me,” he laughed, “that’s just the way I feel. Had lunch with a cracker to-day. Maybe you don’t know what that means yet, but you soon will.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting two men to supper,” Scott laughed, “but I think there is plenty for all three of us.”

Scott started to get another cup and plate, but Mr. Graham had already gotten them for himself and took the seat opposite. He had never seen a man who looked more like his ideal of a woodsman, or one whom he had liked better at first sight. They had not been together five minutes and yet Scott felt as though he had known this big man for months.

“I had word from Washington that you would be down here,” Mr. Graham explained, “but I did not know just when you would come. I had a trip to make and thought I would get it in before you arrived. Found out at the postoffice that you had beaten me to it. What do you think of my hang-out here?”

“It’s a wonder!” Scott exclaimed enthusiastically. “I was just thinking before you came that I would not mind waiting here for you for a week or two.”

Mr. Graham was evidently pleased with his enthusiasm. “Don’t blame you, I feel pretty much that way myself. I ran on to it by chance one time and it took my fancy so that I decided to fix it up for my summer headquarters. I like it so well now that I stay here nearly all the time.”

“You fixed it up?” Scott exclaimed incredulously.

“Sure,” the big fellow grinned, immediately divining his thoughts. “Thought some woman did it, did you?”

Scott admitted it rather sheepishly.

“Yes,” Mr. Graham confessed, “I am somewhat of a lady myself when it comes to a love of flowers and beauty. I dawdle around out there in the yard a good share of my spare time. Not many ‘movies’ around here to distract a fellow’s attention.”

And so they talked till the meal was finished, the dishes washed, and the dishrag hung on its proper nail; for Mr. Graham was as orderly in the house as he was in the yard. Then they settled down in the steamer chairs on the porch and gazed in silence for a few minutes at the line of islands shimmering in the moonlit bay. It was like a scene from a fairy tale.

Mr. Graham broke the spell with a sigh. “I could look at a thing like that all night, but I suppose you are burning up to know something of this peculiar job to which they have assigned you.”

Scott admitted that he was rather curious.

“Well, I’ll try to tell you the whole story. The trouble started about two years ago. The Quiller Lumber Company had bought a big bunch of pine and cypress timber up near the edge of the big swamp. They are a small concern and do not have a very large crew. Of course, that means slow work and easy checking for us. Their slowness came to be a standing joke with the ranger up there who looks after the scaling. He used to say in his diary every now and then, ‘Quiller got down another tree to-day.’

“They had been at it about six months when the foreman came down to see me. ‘Have you noticed anything peculiar about our scale?’ he asked. ‘Noticed there has not been much to scale,’ I told him. ‘That’s just it,’ he said, ‘checked up on the stumps any?’ I explained to him that we seldom did that till a considerable quantity had been cut.

“‘Well, I have,’ he said, ‘and more than half of the stuff we have cut ain’t there.’

“He went on to tell me that he had had a night watchman on the boom for two weeks and tried in every way to check the thing up, but the logs kept disappearing just the same. A lot of his niggers got superstitious about it and quit the job.”

“How do they handle their logs?” Scott asked.

“Skid them down to the edge of the big swamp on high wheels and shove them into a bag boom. Then they raft them and float them out into the river.”

“Do they keep them in the boom long?” Scott was thinking again of the story of the sunken logs.

“Oh, they are not in the bottom of the swamp if that is what you are driving at. Murphy has prodded the bottom of that pond with a pike pole a dozen times.”

“Is there a channel through to the river or can they take them out anywhere?”

“I’ve hunted all over there myself and I cannot find a place where they could take them out except through that one channel.”

“I suppose you have had that channel watched?”

“Watched, I had Murphy hidden up there on a point of land for a month and the logs disappeared out of the boom right along just the same.”

“Are you sure that Murphy is all right?”

“Murphy, why, he thinks more of the Service than the Secretary of Agriculture does. No, sir, it is not graft, I am sure of that; but I would give a good deal to know what it is.”

“Do they disappear before or after you scale them?”

“Did go both before and after. We scale them all in the woods now before they put them in the boom, but they are going out of the boom just the same.”

There was a long pause while both men frowned unseeing across the beautiful lagoon. Scott was thinking of the ranger who had been the leader of the sheep gang in the West and wondering how he could best get a check on Murphy. Mr. Graham had long ago gotten past the point where he could think about it logically at all.

“Has the thing been going on ever since?” Scott asked.

“For two solid years,” Mr. Graham answered peevishly. “I have put about half my time on the pesky thing and Murphy hangs around there like a baited bulldog. The foreman is almost crazy about it. He has all but accused the ‘’gators’ of eating the logs.”

“I suppose they take some rafts out occasionally?”

“Sure. They have been taking them out right along. Have speeded up considerably during the past year.”

“Ever check up the delivery of those logs?”

“Many a time, and so has the company. Check to the dot with the scale in the rafts.”

“If you are scaling in the woods you are getting paid for all they cut, aren’t you?”

“Yes, the company is paying all right. They howl and checkscale a lot, but they pay.”

“Then why is the Service interested in it? They are not losing anything by it.”

“No, they are not losing anything on this scale, but it is hurting our other sales and giving the forest a bad name. We do not like to have a thing like that going on under our very noses. Besides, it gets on a fellow’s nerves. I tried my best on it. Hated to give it up, but had to confess myself licked at last. Then I asked the office for help and you are the result.”

“Some result,” Scott grunted. “I am not a professional detective. I just stumbled on to that sheep graft out there by chance, and now look what it’s gotten me into. I had never been to Florida and was glad enough to come down, but there is a fat chance of my solving this mess. It looks about as clear as mud.”

“That’s about the way it looks to me,” Mr. Graham nodded, “about as clear as mud. But all of us here are hypnotized now. We have been mooning over the thing so long that we cannot see straight any more. We may be walking all over some clue which will be perfectly clear to a stranger with an unfogged mind. Don’t give up before you start, man.”

“I’m not giving up,” Scott exclaimed, “far from it. Now that I have come all the way down here I simply have to put the job through, but I’m going to steer clear of these detective jobs in the future. They are too uncertain. Too much depends on luck.”

“Well, here’s wishing you luck,” said Mr. Graham, rising; “we’ll give you all the help we can, and grunt for you. Let’s go to bed, and to-morrow we’ll ride out and have a look at the arena.” He paused for a moment at the porch railing. “Isn’t that fine? You can just imagine old Ponce de Léon threading his way along that beach looking for the Fountain of Youth four hundred years ago, and I’ll bet he stopped and sampled that very creek.”

This historical touch gave the country a new interest to Scott.

CHAPTER III

Scott and Mr. Graham had an early breakfast together.

“I suppose there is no use in asking a man from the West if he rides?” Mr. Graham laughed.

“Not much,” Scott replied. “If a man lives in that country he has to ride. It almost broke my heart to leave my saddle horse behind, but the ‘super’ there seemed to think that I would be transferred West again and would not be here long enough to make it worth while to ship him East.”

“Humph,” Mr. Graham growled, “judging from my own experience you will be grayheaded before you catch those thieves. Well, I have two ponies here and you can use one of them. He’s not the best in the world, but I guess he’ll do.”

Scott was glad to find the western stock saddle in use here instead of the English saddle he had been used to in his home in Massachusetts. The man who has once become familiar with a stock saddle wants no other. The pony, too, though far from the equal of the big black stallion he had bought from Jed Clark, was a very good one. It was easy to see that Mr. Graham was a connoisseur in more things than cabin sites and flowerbeds. Everything he owned was of the best.