Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/84

76 "Yes."

"Why?"

"Excitement, and everybody was doing it."

"Nothing more?"

"Oh—it was up to me."

"Because we were all in trouble. Yes. We are all going to be in trouble again before long if people go on wasting logs and the opportunities to grow more logs." He shrugged his shoulders indifferently, but she did not appear to notice. "We have only a fifty-year cut of virgin timber left in this whole country. Trees are second in importance only to food. What are we going to do when it is gone?"

"Fifty years is a long time away."

"Europe was three thousand miles away."

"Say, what are you getting at?" he demanded.

"Two things: The first is, that saving these logs is a necessary thing; not perhaps, for you and me, but for the country we live in. It's only three hundred thousand feet or so, but it's going to save just that much standing timber if it's made use of. And the next is that I have from my father a natural fear of waste—waste of material and waste of men and women." He removed his cigarette and flicked off the ash absently. "You admitted back in the car that you had never done anything you can point to. You're about twenty five years old, aren't you? You have already commenced to go to waste—"

"I'm through, though! I'm—"

"You're dodging the first job because it is hard."

"No, because they tried to trick me."

"And if you give up they'll succeed." He arrested the cigarette on it's way back to his lips. "Don't you see that?