Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/135

Rh "Cost? Of course it cost, but you began with such a little capital. Your land must have been so cheap."

She shrugged.

"My father was impractical. His first costs were away higher than necessary. Compounding interest will double the investment in your land every ten years, remember; some years it has cost nearly fifty cents an acre to keep the fires out, and there are ten thousand acres of pine here. We have almost a hundred miles of fire lines that cost a lot of money, and those are only the big items. There's replanting and a hundred other things.

"For twenty years there was no income except from the scattering Norway pine which wasn't good enough to take when the first loggers went through here. After twenty years the young trees were beginning to crowd and slowing down growth, but thinning cost money and there was no return from it then. Meanwhile debts piled up and interest went marching on.

"The value of stumpage went marching on, too, which saved us. It is high now; lumber is higher than it will be six months from now, but it won't drop back to where it was before the war to stay. Never again, because the forests aren't here. The cut of Southern pine has passed its peak—did ten years ago; it will dwindle and then all that America has left will be the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

"Enough there to last forever? No. They said that of New England; they said that of Pennsylvania and New York; they said it of the Lake States. Your father must have said it: that there was enough pine in Michigan to last forever. All those men believed that except my father and when they'd cut thirty years there was no