Page:Hugh Pendexter--The young timber-cruisers.djvu/298

 Abner’s great disappointment he began to go over the situation in detail. Nace had everything to prove his case. Even the big beech with the surveyor’s private mark, made nearly a century before, still stood as a witness for the suspected operator. This led him to notice that the tree he was leaning against also was a beech and his eyes opened in admiration as he decided it must be nearly three feet in diameter.

“It’s more than two and a half feet,” he mused, tapping the trunk idly with the back of his ax. “It’s fully as large—yes, larger—than the one on Nace’s line. It’s about half way.”

Then his breath came in a gasp as his ax-head hit a place that gave back a dead sound.

The bark looked smooth, yet it felt beneath the ax as if the wood were dead.

“It can’t be! it can’t be!” he murmured, sinking down at the foot of the tree.

Then he rose and examined the trunk more carefully. “How Bub would laugh at me if he could see me,” he muttered. But the more he tapped the bark the more excited he became and at last he cut a notch above the hollow sounding spot and one below it.

“That will be a strip about eighteen inches long,” he whispered, hardly daring to proceed.