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............