Chapter 8

"Actually, we discovered the diamond mine and sold all but a small percentage of it because it would cost too much to develop it ourselves. Developing it has cost millions, but it's in the black now and the shares are starting to have a decent return."

"So you're now a 'spoiled rich kid, ' I suppose." Aileen smiled.

"Others think so." I grinned. "I don't know myself. All I've bought right now from the money is some clothes, a pickup truck, and I paid my tuition to the University. Oh, and I bought a little hunk of property in the Highlands, with a log cabin on it."

Paula giggled. "So where will this new car rank, as far as dollar value in comparison?"

"Well." I sighed. "That depends on several things and on your viewpoint too. First, I'd need to know how much the car we're going to buy cost so I could factor that in, but the way I look at things, it might be the most expensive thing I've ever bought."

"You bought property and a log cabin, but a car will be more expensive?" Sydney scoffed. "Come on now, tell us another story."

"Oh, that." I grinned. "We ran across a big hunk of property that people weren't buying because people felt was going to be too much trouble to open up and they thought the original owner was asking too much money."

I don't know why, but Paula must have guessed where I was going because she grinned at me and slipped to my side, wrapping an arm around my waist.

"Mom and I formed a land company, then we bought the whole thing, a hundred and twenty acres." I continued. "Then I brought in a crew of men, rented a D-8 Cat. and roughed a road into it, right down the middle with a couple of little side roads, working on it over one summer. After that, we legally sectioned it into roughly ten acre parcels and had hydro and telephone lines run in. We saved out a thirty-five-acre section at the very end that surrounds a little lake. The land company still owns that for tax reasons, as well as one ten-acre parcel next door. We have a personal agreement about the thirty-five acres; Mom has to look after fifteen acres on her side of the lake, as well as the ten-acre patch that the land company leases to Mary Joe, and I have twenty acres to play with."

"And?" Paula had a curious grin on her face as if she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Oh, there were seven small parcels of property that we had no need of, so we've been selling those off, one at a time." I smiled at her. "So far, we've sold four of them and they've paid for our investment in the land and improvements, as well as for the cost of the unfinished log cabins. So you see, my house and the property it sits on hasn't cost me anything."

"Oh." Sydney said flatly. "I see what you mean. Wait a minute, you said you had seven parcels of property and that you've only sold four."

"Yes."

"Why haven't you sold them all?"

"Because we're looking for the right kind of neighbours." I smiled at her. "A piece of that property only goes for sale after we know what sort of people the potential purchasers are. That way we can't be accused of discrimination in any way."

Aileen sat down slowly and shook her head, then stared at Paula. "Where in the world did you find him? Are there any more like him around?"

"I doubt it, Mom." She grinned. "I may have met him in an art class, but remember, he said he was studying Business Administration?"

"I do, now that you remind me." She looked at me again, but somehow it was like she was seeing me for the first time. "But, to get back to Paula's question, and we'll discount the property as making you money, not costing you money. Your other big purchases have been tuition, which I'd personally call an investment, so that doesn't count either, does it?"

"Well, no, not if you look at it that way." I grinned. "So that leaves the cost of the pickup as the next biggest. That's got two prices on it as well, though."

"Do you want to explain that?" She got a curiously impish look on her face and I followed her eyes to see the strange look on Sydney's face.

Sydney was simply staring at me, her face completely expressionless as if she was trying to hide any emotion.

Paula jabbed me in the ribs. "Quit staring." She whispered.

"Well, she's staring at me." I smiled at her, then waved a hand in front of Sydney, as if checking to see if she was really looking at me or at some point over my shoulder.

"Well, come on, I'm waiting to find out how you made money on your truck." She said flatly.

"Oh, no. I didn't mean to imply that." I shook my head. "When I was clearing the road in with the D-8 Cat., we were following a road that had lead into the bush when it was originally logged off years ago and we came to a section that was on a fairly steep side hill. The old pickup had slid sideways off of the old road and was lodged in between a little rock bluff and a boulder that was probably twice as big as the pickup truck. It was obvious to me that someone had been in there a couple of years before, probably a firewood pirate, and had slid off the road. Then he had somehow managed to get himself into real trouble and had gotten it jammed in there somehow."

"So you just claimed it?" She stared at me even harder.

"Oh no!" I grinned. "It was actually in my way. I had to move it. So, I had a couple of the logs cut to the right length and used the Cat's dozer blade to lift it up, one end at a time. Then we dropped it down onto the logs, skidded it sideways and afterward, we towed the dang thing out of there and stuffed it off into the bush to get it out of our way, that way I could build the new roadway right over the top of where it had been. I was actually having a search done, using the serial numbers from the darn thing to try to run down the owner when he came and found me."

"So he claimed it?"

"Well, yes and no." I grinned even wider. "He was trying to play safe, just so he wouldn't have to admit to trespass or log theft and yet he was trying to blame me for crushing his pickup truck underneath my new roadbed."

"But you said you just hauled it out of your way and..."

"... and stuffed it into the bush." I nodded. "You have to remember, I was running a D-8 Cat. I had a pile of logs and another one of brush piled between the pickup truck and the road."

"So he hadn't seen that you'd pulled it out?"

"Nope, and I didn't make any claims one way or another about it. I just asked him where it had been parked and why it had been there."

Aileen was chuckling now and Paula was trying her best to hold back a serious bout of the giggles.

"It's not funny!" Sydney snorted.

"Oh, I thought it was hilarious." I chuckled. "You see, we'd put up a sign when we started the roadway that we were planning on selling off the logs we'd be salvaging along the roadway, and he'd come in there, supposedly as a log buyer. But, while he was there, he was probably going to see if there was any way to try to sneak back in when we were gone for the night to get his truck out somehow, yet do it without my knowing about it. The only trouble was that the roadway had already been built over the top of where is truck had been."

Even she was grinning a bit now. "So he was playing both ends against the middle and you just let him trap himself?"

"More or less." I nodded. "I listened to him yammer for a while and finally acted like I was simply too darn busy to waste any more time about it. I asked him how long it had been sitting there and what the dang thing was worth to him, bottom of the line. He hemmed and hawed, then told me a hundred and fifty bucks. I offered him a hundred if he'd get the proof of ownership and sign the transfer of title over to me, then asked him to get out of my hair."

I paused and grinned at her, waiting for her to react and finally she bit.

"Well?" She demanded, grinning, but not wanting to because she knew I'd wait all night if I had to.

"See what being patient and waiting can do?" I grinned. "He was back in about an hour with the transfer of title all made out, all I had to do was sign it and pay him. Now by that time, I and a kid were back down the road clearing away a pile of bush to expose a really nice looking stack of logs, perfect for firewood. He saw that pile of firewood logs and offered to trade the truck for them. I warned him that the logs had to be gone by four o'clock that afternoon, but he assured me that was no problem. To make it official, I signed the paper, buying the truck, handed him the money in cash and he signed a paper for me, buying the logs and handed the money back. Then he climbed on top of the log pile to check it out even closer and saw the truck parked behind them. I don't think I've ever heard some of those swear words before."

Aileen and Paula were laughing so hard they were crying and by now even Sydney was grinning and chuckling. I just sat there and grinned for a moment.

"It turned out to be a darned expensive truck though, considering that I found it in the bush." I shook my head slowly as my face sobered. "First of all, I had to get it hauled into town to a garage; then I had to spend a bundle on it to get it fixed up the way I wanted it. In the long run, fully restored and painted, it cost me sixteen grand."

"Holy smoke! You spent sixteen thousand dollars on an old junker that you found in the bush?"

"Un huh, but the real expense was caused by the guy who owned the junker before me. He was a real sneaky bastrich and even though I'd hired a security guard, chained the entrance gate on the roadway and parked the Cat. in the road at night, he was sneaking in, cutting up my best sawlogs and hauling them away for firewood. I figure he got away with close to twenty grand worth of wood before we caught him. I had to hire a couple of the neighbour boys from up there, but they managed to get him."

"I suppose there's a story to that too, is there?"

"Yeah, we couldn't figure out how he was getting those logs out of there and not making a lot of noise. I hired those two local kids and they made a deal with me that they'd run this guy right into the hands of the cops. That was providing I could get the cops to come out where we wanted them to be waiting on the road at the right spot and at the right time, on the right night. We had to wait almost a week, but the kids were right, the guy worked by moonlight and the first moonlight night, we set it all up.

"I had a friend on the police force and I talked to him about it. He arranged to have the night off officially, then he came out with me. We actually found where the guy had his truck hidden, down the road and in a driveway, so we blocked that in with the policeman's car. Then we walked back to where the kids had said the guy would show up on the road with the sawlogs. He did too. He came out of the bush right into our welcoming arms."

"What, carrying the logs?"

"No, dragging them, he was using a darn horse." I shook my head. "It turned out that his brother-in-law raised draft horses, then trained them to work in harness to haul logs out of the bush, the same way the independent loggers did years ago. The crook had managed to talk his brother-in-law into letting him use one of his horses and a harness. I was making it easy for him by cutting and stacking the logs; all he had to do was find one of my log piles, hook a logging chain onto a couple of logs, and haul the dang things away. He'd hide them in the bush on someone else's property and arrange to get permission to cut wood there. Then he'd come back in the daylight, cut my logs up into firewood with his chainsaw, haul them off and sell perfectly good sawlogs as firewood. He was selling sawlogs that would have made good lumber, but he'd only get a tenth of their worth."

"He did that to get back at you about the truck?"

"Partly, I suppose." I shrugged my shoulders. "I think it was more because he was a lazy lout and I was making it easy for him. You see I was stacking the logs in piles, but I was stacking them back on side roads, so it would be easy for me to get at them later with the truck. At the same time, it was supposed to be harder for him, not easier. Our whole security was set up to catch someone using a truck or tractor and trailer, but by using a horse, he snuck in by the side door."