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.
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