Raymond ignored her.
He looked at the old block from Eli's workshop next.
Then at the mark in the photograph.
"Related style," he said. "Not enough for me to tell you same company."
"Have you seen it?"
"Maybe on old river timber. Maybe in a book. Marks weren't always unique forever. Crews copied shapes. Companies changed partners."
He finally studied the 1887 map.
His finger followed the west chute.
Then he looked at Norah's pasture sketch.
"Where exactly were these logs sitting?"
Norah marked the curve.
Raymond adjusted the two maps side by side.
"Well," he said.
Eli waited.
Raymond tapped the old blue line.
"Your pasture isn't merely near an old river channel."
He tapped again.
"It's sitting right on top of it."
Norah felt a thrill of vindication.
Raymond must have seen it.
He raised one finger.
"That still doesn't make every black log valuable."
The thrill moderated.
"I knew you were going to say that."
"Good. Means you're learning."
Raymond cut a thin slice from the damaged sample where it was already broken.
The interior was astonishing.
Several inches of gray-brown stained wood gave way to straight, fine grain that shone warm reddish-gold after one pass of a plane. The contrast made Norah stare. Outside, the log looked dead. Inside, it looked as if the tree had been cut yesterday and aged in darkness rather than decay.
Raymond ran his palm over the fresh surface.
"Good wood," he said.
Coming from him, the phrase carried more weight than Marcus Sterling's fifteen hundred dollars.
"How good?" Norah asked.
"Good enough that you don't sell forty logs as a blind lot until you know which ones are sound."
Eli nodded.
"And good enough," Raymond added, "that if Sterling already saw the marks and sizes, he probably knew exactly why he wanted the pile."
That was the first time an adult other than Norah said it plainly.
Marcus had not been guessing in the dark.
He had been betting that the Bells were.
Raymond did not let them leave with certainty they had not earned. He wrapped the freshly planed section in brown paper, wrote the date and source on the outside, and told Eli to keep every scrap associated with the first sample. Then he made Norah write down exactly which trunk the broken piece had come from, where that trunk lay in the pile, and who had been present when it was collected.
"You think this is evidence?" she asked.
"I think memory improves every time money appears," Raymond said. "Documentation doesn't."
Eli nodded in approval.
Raymond pointed toward the photographs. "If you recover more, number each log before you move it. Paint on a removable tag or tie something around it. Don't carve new marks. Don't cut through old ones. Take pictures from both ends, measure length and diameter, and note where it sat."
Norah wrote quickly.
"And don't let anybody tell you one beautiful slice means you've got forty beautiful logs. A trunk can be sound here and hollow ten feet away."
"Marcus wants all of them," Norah said.
"Marcus wants enough good ones to make the bad ones irrelevant."
Eli raised an eyebrow. "You know that or guessing?"