Bob was finally late for supper, which he ate hastily and without much
appetite. After finishing the meal, he hunted up Welton. He found the
lumberman tilted back in a wooden armchair, his feet comfortably
elevated to the low rail about the stove, his pipe in mouth, his coat
off, and his waistcoat unbuttoned. At the sight of his homely, jolly
countenance, Bob experienced a pleasant sensation of slipping back from
an environment slightly off-focus to the normal, accustomed and real.
Nevertheless, at the first opportunity, he tested his new doubts by
Welton's common sense.
"I rode through our slash on 18," he remarked. "That's an awful mess."
"Slashes are," replied Welton succinctly.
"If the thing gets afire it will make a hot blaze."
"Sure thing," agreed Welton. "But we've never had one go yet--at least,
while we were working. There's men enough to corral anything like that."
"But we've always worked in a wet country," Bob pointed out. "Here it's
dry from April till October."
"Have to take chances, then; and jump on a fire quick if it starts,"
said Welton philosophically.
"These forest men advise certain methods of obviating the danger," Bob
suggested.
"Pure theory," returned Welton. "The theory's a good one, too," he
added. "That's where these college men are strong--only it isn't
practical. They mean well enough, but they haven't the knowledge. When
you look at anything broad enough, it looks easy. That's what busts so
many people in the lumber business." He rolled out one of his jolly
chuckles. "Lumber barons!" he chortled. "Oh, it's easy enough! Any
mossback can make money lumbering! Here's your stumpage at a dollar a
thousand, and there's your lumber at twenty! Simplest thing in the
world. Just the same there are more failures in the lumber business than
in any other I know anything about. Why is it?"
"Economic waste," put in Merker, who was leaning across the counter.
"Lack of experience," said Bob.
"A little of both," admitted Welton; "but it's more because the business
is made up of ten thousand little businesses. You have to conduct a
cruising business, and a full-fledged real estate and mortgage business;
you have to build houses and factories, make roads, build railroads; you
have to do a livery trade, and be on the market for a thousand little
things. Between the one dollar you pay for stumpage and the twenty
dollars you get for lumber lies all these things. Along comes your
hardware man and says, Here, why don't you put in my new kind of spark
arrestor; think how little it costs; what's fifty dollars to a
half-million-dollar business? The spark arrester's a good thing all
right, so you put it in. And then there's maybe a chance to use a little
paint and make the shanties look like something besides shanties; that
don't cost much, either, to a half-million-dollar business. And so on
through a thousand things. And by and by it's costing twenty dollars and
one cent to get your lumber to market; and it's B-U-S-T, bust!"
"That's economic waste," put in Merker.
"Or lack of experience," added Bob.
"No," said Welton, emphasizing his point with his pipe; _"it's not
sticking to business!_ It's not stripping her down to the bare
necessities! It's going in for frills! When you get to be as old as I
am, you learn not to monkey with the band wagon."
His round, red face relaxed into one of his good-humoured grins, and he
relit his pipe.
"That's the trouble with this forestry monkey business. It's all right
to fool with, if you want fooling. So's fancy farming. But it don't pay.
If you are playing, why, it's all right to experiment. If you ain't,
why, it's a good plan to stick to the methods of lumbering. The present
system of doing things has been worked out pretty thorough by a lot of
pretty shrewd business men. And it _works!"_
Bob laughed.
"Didn't know you could orate to that extent," he gibed. "Sic'em!"
Welton grinned a trifle abashed. "You don't want to get me started,
then," said he.
"Oh, but I do!" Bob objected, for the second time that day.
"Now this slashing business," went on the old lumberman in a more
moderate tone. "When the millennium comes, it would be a fine thing to
clear up the old slashings." He turned suddenly to Bob. "How long do you
think it would take you with a crew of a dozen men to cut and pile the
waste stuff in 18?" he inquired.
Bob cast back the eye of his recollection to the hopeless tangle that
cumbered the ground.
"Oh, Lord!" he ejaculated; "don't ask me!"
"If you were running a business would you feel like stopping work and
sending your men--whom you are feeding and paying--back there to pile up
that old truck?"
Bob's mind, trained to the eager hurry of the logging season, recoiled
from this idea in dismay.
"I should say not!" he cried. Then as a second thought he added: "But
what they want is to pile the tops while the work is going on."
"It takes just so much time to do so much work," stated Welton
succinctly, "and it don't matter whether you do it all at once, or try
to fool yourself by spraddling it out."
He pulled strongly at his pipe.
"Forest Reserves are all right enough," he acknowledged, "and maybe some
day their theories will work out. But not now; not while taxes go on!"