Marcus looked at Eli. "You created this."
"Flood did."
They worked the afternoon without trouble.
Marcus's crew lifted the trunk carefully, placed it on cribbing, and never once suggested buying it. At the end of the job, Marcus walked over to Norah while Eli wrote the check.
"You know what your problem is?"
"Which one?"
"You watch people too closely."
"That seems like your problem."
He smiled. "Probably."
Their relationship never became friendship exactly, but it became something more useful than suspicion. Marcus occasionally called when he encountered old marked timber elsewhere and asked whether Clara had records. Norah referred one seller to Raymond when Marcus admitted he could not identify a species confidently.
Knowledge that began as leverage slowly became shared information.
That development pleased Eli more than any victory over Marcus would have.
"People do better when the lesson doesn't require permanent enemies," he told Norah.
"Sometimes enemies are simpler."
"Most bad ideas are."
By the time Norah was seventeen, the flood story had become local history rather than current gossip. New families heard fragments. People who had been there improved details without meaning to. In one version, Norah had discovered fifty giant cypress logs worth a million dollars. In another, Marcus had attempted to steal them at night. A third claimed the logs came from a sunken steamboat.
Norah corrected stories when correction mattered and let harmless exaggerations die on their own when it did not.
Clara found this growth impressive.
"Two years ago you'd have chased a man across town to correct the number of logs."
"It was forty-three tagged pieces."
Clara stared.
Norah sighed. "I'm still working on it."
The actual records remained clear.
Forty-three tagged trunks and large pieces in the main debris field.
Sixteen candidates that appeared historically old or worked.
Several unusable.
Several sold as ordinary reclaimed cypress.
A smaller number sold as premium old-growth recovered material after inspection.
Three marked trunks retained because of unusual condition and historical significance.
The farm stabilized.
No miracle.
No fortune.
Just enough value recognized at the right moment to matter.
For Eli, that mattered more than stories about riches. A farm survived by accumulating enough correct decisions to outlast bad weather. One great year could not compensate for endless careless ones. The riverwood gave them room, but what they did with that room mattered more.
They repaired instead of expanding recklessly.
They saved instead of assuming another extraordinary discovery would appear.
They sold material slowly.
They paid taxes.
They kept records.
They left Log 1 where it rested beneath the old channel because there was still no need to dig it up.
Norah sometimes imagined somebody fifty years later finding it again and wondering why one end had been documented so carefully while the rest remained underground.
She liked that possibility.
Not every mystery needed to belong entirely to one generation.
Years later, when Eli told the story, he never began with the flood.
He began with Marcus Sterling's boots.
"Cleanest boots in the county," he would say.
Norah always interrupted. "That's not how it started."