Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/37

Rh ain't any camps any more, 'cause they've out all th' stuff off.

"You bet your life I'm goin' to Detroit. I'd'a' went last summer but a darn fool warden pinched me an' I had to hang around. Jim Harris got me off, but it took a long time."

"Why did he arrest you?"

"Oh, I dropped a cigarette out here in summer an' started a fire that run over a little no-account brush—thousand acres he said—an' he held me under the fire law. Damn fresh guy, he was, who don't know no more about these here plains than I do about diamonds. Started in arrestin' everybody that set a fire, an' got everybody sore on him."

"No use stopping fires, is that it?"

"Hell, no! He claimed if you kep' 'em out, trees would grow, but we all know damn well fire'll get in sooner or later, an' that th' soil's so poor it won't grow nothin' nohow. There's some that says it'll grow timber again, but they're just plain ignorant." He laughed.

"Why, there was a guy named Foraker who used to talk a lot about raisin' timber like a crop. Everybody knows he was wrong. He bought a big piece up ahead here, ten—twelve thousand acres, an' spent all he could get his hands on tryin' to grow pine, but it won't work. Everybody knows that. We called him Foolish Foraker an' called his land Foraker's Folly. He sunk a lot of money puttin' fires out an' growin' pine trees to plant."

"And they wouldn't grow?"

"They won't grow fast enough! It'd take a thousand years to grow trees like them stumps. Oh, they've got some scraggly little pine up here. Foraker's dead, but his daughter, she lives there. She's had some swamp land