But it was not in Scattergood to sit idle while he waited for his stock
to arrive. Coldriver doubtless thought him idle, but he was studying the
locality and the river with the eye of a commander who knew this was to
be his battlefield. What Scattergood wanted now was to place himself
astride Coldriver Valley, somewhere below the village, so that he could
control the upper reaches of the stream. It was not difficult to find
such a location. It lay three miles below town, at the junction of the
north and south branches of Coldriver. The juncture was in a big,
marshy, untillable flat, from which hills rose abruptly. From the
easterly end of the flat the augmented river squeezed in a roaring
rapids through a sort of bottle neck.
Scattergood stood on the hillside and looked upon this with satisfied
eye.
"A dam across that bottle neck," he said to himself, "will flood that
flat. Reg'lar reservoy. Millpond. Git a twenty-foot fall here easy,
maybe more. Calc'late that'll run about any mill folks'll want to build.
And," he scratched his head as a sort of congratulation to it for its
efficiency, "I can't study out how anybody's agoin' to git logs past
here without dickerin' with the man who owns the dam.
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