They turned back toward the rear.

“By the way,” Welton remarked, “you made one bad break just now.”

“What was that?” asked Bob.

“You told me you were not on the payrolls of this company.  You are.”

XVIII

For a year Bob worked hard at all sorts of jobs.  He saw the woods work, the river work, the mill work.  From the stump to the barges he followed the timbers.  Being naturally of a good intelligence, he learned very fast how things were done, so that at the end of the time mentioned he had acquired a fair working knowledge of how affairs were accomplished in this business he had adopted.  That does not mean he had become a capable lumberman.  One of the strangest fallacies long prevalent in the public mind is that lumbering is always a sure road to wealth.  The margin of profit seems very large.  As a matter of fact, the industry is so swiftly conducted, on so large a scale, along such varied lines; the expenditures must be made so lavishly, and yet so carefully; the consequences of a niggardly policy are so quickly apparent in decreased efficiency, and yet the possible leaks are so many, quickly draining the most abundant resources, that few not brought up through a long apprenticeship avoid a loss.  A great deal of money has been and is made in timber.  A great deal has been lost, simply because, while the possibilities are alluring, the complexity of the numerous problems is unseen.

At first Bob saw only the results.  You went into the woods with a crew of men, felled trees, cut them into lengths, dragged them to the roads already prepared, piled them on sleighs, hauled them to the river, and stacked them there.  In the spring you floated the logs to the mill where they were sawed into boards, laden into sailing vessels or steam barges, and taken to market.  There was the whole process in a nutshell.  Of course, there would be details and obstructions to cope with.  But between the eighty thousand dollars or so worth of trees standing in the forest and the quarter-million dollars or so they represented at the market seemed space enough to allow for many reverses.

As time went on, however, the young man came more justly to realize the minuteness of the bits comprising this complicated mosaic.  From keeping men to the point of returning, in work, the worth of their wages; from so correlating and arranging that work that all might be busy and not some waiting for others; up through the anxieties of weather and the sullen or active opposition of natural forces, to the higher levels of competition and contracts, his awakened attention taught him that legitimate profits could attend only on vigilant and minute attention, on comprehensive knowledge of detail, on experience, and on natural gift.  The feeding of men abundantly at a small price involved questions of buying, transportation and forethought, not to speak of concrete knowledge