“I know.  It seems foolish.  Can’t make it seem anything else,” Bob admitted.

“You’d have to take your chances,” Thorne persisted.  “I couldn’t help you.  A ranger’s salary is ninety a month now, and find yourself and horses.  Have you any private means?”

“Not enough to say so.”

“There’s another thing,” Thorne went on.  “This forestry of our government is destined to be a tremendous affair; but what we need more just now is better logging methods among the private loggers.  It would count more than anything else if you’d stay just where you are and give us model operations in your own work.”

Bob shook his head.

“Perhaps you don’t know men like Mr. Welton as well as I do,” said he; “I couldn’t change his methods.  That’s absolutely out of the question.  And,” he went on with a sudden flash of loyalty to what the old-timers had meant, “I don’t believe I’d want to.”

“Not want to!” cried Amy.

“No,” pursued Bob doggedly, “not unless he could see the point himself and of his own accord.  He’s done a great work in his time, and he’s grown old at it.  I wouldn’t for anything in the world do anything to shake his faith in what he’s done, even if he’s doing it wrong now.”

“He and his kind have always slaughtered the forests shamefully!” broke in Amy with some heat.

“They opened a new country for a new people,” said Bob gently.  “Perhaps they did it wastefully; perhaps not.  I notice you’ve got to use lots of lubricating oil on a new machine.  But there was nobody else to do it any different.”

“Then you’d let them go on wasting and destroying?” demanded Amy scornfully.

“I don’t know,” hesitated Bob; “I haven’t thought all this out.  Perhaps I’m not very much on the think.  It seems to me rather this way:  We’ve got to have lumber, haven’t we?  And somebody has to cut it and supply it.  Men like Mr. Welton are doing it, by the methods they’ve found effective.  They are working for the Present; we of the new generation want to work for the Future.  It’s a fair division.  Somebody’s got to attend to them both.”

“Well, that’s what I say!” cried Amy.  “If they wouldn’t waste and slash and leave good material in the woods—­”

Bob smiled whimsically.

“A lumberman doesn’t like to leave things in the woods,” said he.  “If somebody will pay for the tops and the needles, he’ll sell them; if there’s a market for cull lumber, he’ll supply it; and if somebody will create a demand for knotholes, he’ll invent some way of getting them out!  You see I’m a lumberman myself.”

“Why don’t you log with some reference to the future, then?” demanded Amy.

“Because it doesn’t pay,” stated Bob deliberately.

“Pay!” cried Amy.