Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/338

330 She waited. Rowe frowned. Luke blinked again. She sighed briefly, as though this bored her.

"A peculiar business," Rowe laughed, "that heads straight into bankruptcy for the sake of an abstract idea."

"Is it peculiar business to keep the capital invested well invested? Or to expect that the business should yield fair returns on the capital, Mr. Rowe? Is it unusual when the early period of a new business requires increasing investments with a growing burden of compounding interest, all of which are returned and multiplied when the business becomes established and its turn-over regular?"

"Theory, Miss Foraker. You're trying to apply very fine-sounding phrases to an enterprise which hasn't been proven. A real business does not refuse to sell its products when they're ready for market and when the firm is embarrassed by the demands of its creditors, you know."

"Nor does a factory sell its unfinished products, Mr. Rowe. My timber is merchantable, but it is not ripe. If you were a stock grower and owned a good calf which might bring ten dollars for veal, you would resent it if some one insisted that you sell when you knew that by keeping the calf until it matured, even though it cost you for care and feed and involved risk, it would bring ten or twenty times that price as a pure-bred cow. I'm in the position of such a stock grower. My volume growth of timber is increasing, increasing faster than the carrying charges, and real quality increment has just commenced to show. What are northern pine uppers quoted at now, Mr. Rowe? Then there is the increment of price due to the national timber shortage which sent white pine from