Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/36

28 dead, while a clump of fresh brush rose from the living roots. Poplar and birch grew up through a tangle of punky, brittle trunks that had been trees not so long ago, that had given up life before fire and had finally fallen among their growing progeny.

From ridges, Taylor could see miles of this. They dropped down into sweeping valleys of the same thing. Now and then would be a patch of country with nothing but grass among the stumps, and that, in this early month, was dead and gray. There were no stones in the road, little gravel in sight, and here and there, where the sod was broken, yellow sand showed, streaked with black where the charcoal of countless ground fires had settled into the light soil. In places were lonely Norway pines, watchers over this devastation, and occasionally the blackened corpses of mighty trees still reared themselves high, without limb or branch, straight, slim and tall, like great exclamation points set there to emphasize the ruin that was where a forest had been.

"You from Detroit?" Lucius asked. John assented. "That's where I am goin' b' God. Nothin' here for a young feller; I'm practicin' up at th' garage so I can get a good job in Detroit. It gets darned awful lonesome, but I ain't got much longer to stay here."

"I don't suppose Pancake is very lively."

"Naw! Nobody but old folks an' little kids there. Why, I'm th' only young feller in town. All th' rest beat it; every mother's son-of-a-gun. You see," growing profound, "there ain't nothin' here to hold us. Up yonder's some hardwood lands, an' that's th' only soil worth a damn in th' county, an' who wants to farm when you can work in a factory? I like the woods myself, but there