of how much such things should ideally be worth.  Tools by the thousand were needed at certain places and at certain times.  They must be cared for and accounted for.  Horses, and their feed, equipment and care, made another not inconsiderable item both of expense and attention.  And so with a thousand and one details which it would be superfluous to enumerate here.  Each cost money, and some one’s time.  Relaxed attention might make each cost a few pennies more.  What do a few pennies amount to?  Two things:  a lowering of the standard of efficiency, and, in the long run, many dollars.  If incompetence, or inexperience should be added to relaxed attention, so that the various activities do not mortise exactly one with another, and the legitimate results to be expected from the pennies do not arrive, then the sum total is very apt to be failure.  Where organized and settled industries, however complicated in detail, are in a manner played by score, these frontier activities are vast improvisations following only the general unchangeable laws of commerce.

Therefore, Bob was very much surprised and not a little dismayed at what Mr. Welton had to say to him one evening early in the spring.

It was in the “van” of Camp Thirty-nine.  Over in the corner under the lamp the sealer and bookkeeper was epitomizing the results of his day.  Welton and Bob sat close to the round stove in the middle, smoking their pipes.  The three or four bunks belonging to Bob, the scaler, and the camp boss were dim in another corner; the shelves of goods for trade with the men occupied a third.  A rude door and a pair of tiny windows communicated with the world outside.  Flickers of light from the cracks in the stove played over the massive logs of the little building, over the rough floor and the weapons and snowshoes on the wall.  Both Bob and Welton were dressed in flannel and kersey, with the heavy German socks and lumberman’s rubbers on their feet.  Their bright-checked Mackinaw jackets lay where they had been flung on the beds.  Costume and surroundings both were a thousand miles from civilization; yet civilization was knocking at the door.  Welton gave expression to this thought.

“Two seasons more’ll finish us, Bob,” said he.  “I’ve logged the Michigan woods for thirty-five years, but now I’m about done here.”

“Yes, I guess they’re all about done,” agreed Bob.

“The big men have gone West; lots of the old lumber jacks are out there now.  It’s our turn.  I suppose you know we’ve got timber in California?”

“Yes,” said Bob, with a wry grin, as he thought of the columns of “descriptions” he had copied; “I know that.”

“There’s about half a billion feet of it.  We’ll begin to manufacture when we get through here.  I’m going out next month, as soon as the snow is out of the mountains, to see about the plant and the general lay-out.  I’m going to leave you in charge here.”

Bob almost dropped his pipe as his jaws fell apart.