“Before you make a fool of yourself again, young man,” he said, speaking directly to Charley, “you had better know what you are talking about.  You called me a profiteer for asking $100 a thousand feet for those cedar boards.  Young man, those boards cost me $90 a thousand in the cars at the station.  That leaves me a margin of $10 a thousand for handling them.  Out of that I have to pay to have the boards hauled from the station, pay for insurance on them, pay their proportionate share of overhead expense, and pay for hauling them to customers.  How much of that $10 do you think is left for profit?  So little it almost requires a microscope to see it.  I have to handle a good many hundred feet of lumber to make as much as the cheapest sort of laborer gets for a day’s pay.  The fact is, young man, that far from profiteering on that lumber, I am selling it at a smaller profit than I ever sold any lumber before in my life.  Some lumber I am handling at a loss.  But in these critical days, with factories closing everywhere, and men by the thousands being thrown out of work, the best thing a man can do, either for himself or for his country, is to keep business moving.  That’s why I am selling lumber without profit.”

Charley was suddenly abashed.  “I’m awfully sorry I called you a profiteer,” he said humbly.  “I beg your pardon.”

“It’s all right, young man,” said the lumber dealer, a smile once more lighting up his face.  “You are too young to understand how critical the business situation really is.  But be careful in future how you call people names.”

“I certainly will,” agreed Charley.  “But I’d like to know this.  Who is profiteering in lumber?  Who is responsible for such terrible prices?”

“Well, there has been profiteering in lumber, as in everything else.  But there is a real reason why the price of lumber is so high, and that is the scarcity of timber.”

“Scarcity!” cried Charley incredulously.  “Why, the forests are full of timber.”

“And what is it like?” demanded the lumber dealer.  “Go out to the forests and look at it.  There’s nothing but little poles that will scarcely make six-inch boards.  We don’t produce one-fourth of the lumber we use in this state, and we are using wood ten times as fast as our forests are growing it.”

“I thought Pennsylvania was a great lumbering state,” protested Lew.

“For a good many years it led the nation in the production of lumber, young man, but now it ranks twentieth among the states.  If only fire could be kept out of the forests, we might some day raise our own timber again.  But the lumbermen chopped down the big trees and fire has destroyed the little ones and even burned the forest soil so that nothing grows in it again.  We have not only destroyed our forests, but we have so injured the land that new trees do not grow to take the place of those we cut.”

The two boys stared at the lumberman in amazement.  “Where do we get our lumber from?” demanded Lew.