Ruth Payne, the burly president of the North West Lumber Company, looked up from a stack of reports he had been studying. Seated with him at a table in the company's offices, were four other men and a girl. Anxiety showed on the faces of two of them - young Larry Kent and old man Jordan, who shared the ownership of the lumber enterprise with Payne. Bill Collins - a rival lumberman - looked bored. The other members of the group were Matt McClane and his daughter, Jean. The men wanted to know why they weren't making as much money as they had been promised, and Matt McClane was going to be the one to tell them. During the last few months, half of the logs had been rustled - intercepted on the river before they reached the sawmills...