Clara returned with a city and county commercial directory dated 1890. Bellamy & Cross Timber Company was listed with an office near the river and a cypress yard at Dawes Landing. A second directory from 1893 no longer listed the company. In a probate index Clara found a reference suggesting one partner had died and the firm had been dissolved.
"Do we know their timber mark?" Norah asked.
Clara shook her head. "Not from this. Companies sometimes registered marks. Sometimes they didn't. Depends on period and local practice."
"Where would that be?"
"County records. Maybe state archives if you're unlucky."
"I'm always unlucky," Eli said.
Clara ignored him. "You also need maps. The river in 1891 was not the river you know now."
That became the next problem.
Modern road maps showed the Bell farm well away from the main river. Even during severe flooding, water reached them through connected drainage and low ground rather than a direct riverbank overflow. If timber had entered a chute in 1891, Norah needed to understand where that chute had been.
Clara led them upstairs to a map cabinet with wide shallow drawers. She pulled county plats, drainage surveys, and an Army Corps map reproduced from older channel data. The oldest sheets were fragile and had to remain beneath clear protective film.
At first Norah saw only an impossible web of lines.
Creeks changed names.
Roads vanished.
Property boundaries used owners who had been dead eighty years.
Eli found their present road by matching two section corners. Clara helped locate a cemetery that existed on both maps. Then Norah traced a broad curve drawn in faded blue pencil on an 1887 survey.
It bent west from the river, passed through what was then a low cypress flat, and rejoined farther south.
Beside it someone had written WEST CHUTE.
Norah felt her heartbeat quicken.
"There."
Eli bent over the map.
Clara brought the modern property survey and laid a transparent sheet over both. They could not align them perfectly because the scales differed, so Clara used section lines and a road crossing as fixed references. Slowly, carefully, the old channel moved into place beneath the modern landscape.
It ran across the southern portion of what was now Bell land.
Not near it.
Through it.
Directly beneath the lower pasture.
Norah placed one finger on the curve. "The log pile is here."
Eli compared her hand-drawn pasture map. "Approximately."
"Granddad."
"Approximately."
"That's your excited voice."
"I don't have an excited voice."
Clara smiled. "He does. It sounds exactly like his ordinary voice except he says approximately twice."
Eli gave her a look.
Norah laughed.
The laughter helped because the discovery was starting to feel too large. A week earlier the pasture had been ordinary ground. Now an old river channel appeared to exist beneath it, and a newspaper from nearly a century before described lost cypress entering a channel with the same name.
Still, Eli made her list what they did not know.
They did not know whether the article's west chute was the exact channel on the map.
They did not know how far the logs could have traveled.
They did not know whether the marks on the Bell logs belonged to Bellamy & Cross.
They did not know whether all forty logs came from the same event.
They did not know whether the valuable-looking interiors extended through entire trunks.
They did not know who legally owned timber buried beneath private land for generations if the original company no longer existed.
Norah disliked that last question.
"They're on our land."
"That doesn't automatically answer everything," Eli said.
"Marcus said the same thing."
"Marcus says whatever helps Marcus. Doesn't mean every word is wrong."
Clara suggested the county records office before lunch ended.