“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.”