He had sold only stumpage, which meant that the Blackburn camp had the right to take out as much timber as it cared to, as long as it was paid for at the insignificant rate of one dollar and fifty cents a thousand feet.

Thayer and the men in his employ could not keep him out of his own woods, or prevent him from cutting his own timber.

But they could prevent him from getting it to the mill by an inexpensive process.
From dawn until dusk he labored, sometimes with Ba'tiste singing lustily beside him, sometimes alone.

The task was a hard one; the snaking of timber through the forest to the high-line roadway, there to be loaded upon two-wheeled carts and dragged, by a slow, laborious, costly process, to the mill.

For every log that he sent to the saw in this wise, he knew that Thayer was sending ten,--and at a tenth of the cost.