Norah turned the photograph over.
Faded pencil covered the back.
Eli read it aloud because the handwriting was difficult.
"'August 1936. River down beyond memory. Pulled four old sticks from west slough below Bell field. Good cypress under black skin. A.B.'"
Norah looked up.
"West slough."
"Could mean the same old channel."
"Bell field."
"Could be this place or family land nearby."
"And the mark."
Eli turned the photograph over again.
The mark was unmistakably similar.
Norah felt vindication surge again, but this time Eli did not immediately temper it.
He sat on an overturned bucket and studied the image for a long while.
"My father told me they found old wood during a dry summer," he said. "I thought it was one or two pieces. I never knew they photographed it."
"Why didn't he tell you more?"
"Maybe he did."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's probably true."
Norah frowned.
Eli looked at the photograph. "When I was young, old men talked and I assumed they'd keep talking forever."
That silenced her.
He ran his thumb over the pencil note without touching the writing itself.
"By the time I learned questions had value, half the people with answers were gone."
Norah sat beside him on a toolbox.
"Then we write this down."
Eli glanced at her.
"Everything."
She opened her notebook.
"Photo number one. August 1936. Amos Bell. West slough. Four old cypress logs."
Eli smiled faintly.
"You're going to make Clara very happy."
The next day they returned to the lower pasture with tags made from aluminum scrap and wire. Norah numbered every large dark trunk they could identify without moving it. Logs 1 through 43. She recorded approximate length, exposed diameter, visible defects, position, and whether any human marks appeared.
The process changed the pile again.
Once numbered, it stopped being a single mess.
Log 1 was the five-foot giant with the clearest mark.
Log 2 lay partly beneath it and showed a squared notch near the base.
Log 3 carried a second symbol and a mineral-dark stripe along one side.
Log 4 was large but badly split.
Log 5 looked impressive until Eli probed a soft section that suggested decay.
Several smaller trunks were clearly recent flood debris and had roots attached.
Only sixteen appeared old enough or worked enough to warrant serious examination.
Of those, three remained exceptional.
Norah understood why Marcus kept returning to them.
The flood had not delivered forty valuable antique logs.
It had exposed a mixed deposit: old timber, newer debris, branches, and perhaps several generations of wood trapped by the same low channel.
That distinction made the discovery more believable and, strangely, more exciting.
"It's not treasure," she said while tying Tag 16 around a dark trunk.