“You mean——?”

“I mean—­this is only my private opinion, you understand—­that lumbering has been done so wastefully and badly that it has been necessary, merely as education, to go to the other extreme.  We’ve insisted on chopping and piling the tops like cordwood, and cutting up the down trunks of trees, and generally ‘parking’ the forest simply to get the idea into people’s heads.  They’d never thought of such things before.  I don’t believe it’s necessary to go to such extremes, practically; and I don’t believe the Service will demand it when it comes actually to do business.”

Elliott and Bob looked at each other a little astonished.

“Mind you, I don’t talk this way outside; and I don’t want you to do so,” pursued Thorne.  “But when you come right down to it, all that’s necessary is to prevent fire from running—­and, of course, to leave a few seed-trees.  Yo’ can keep fire from running just as well by piling the debris in isolated heaps, as by chopping it up and stacking it.  And it’s a lot cheaper.”

He leaned forward.

“That’s coming,” he continued.  “Now you, Elliott, have had as thorough a theoretical education as the schools can give you; and you, Orde, have had a lot of practical experience in logging.  You ought to make a good pair.  Here’s a map of the Government holdings hereabouts.  What I want is a working plan for every forty, together with a topographical description, an estimate of timber, and a plan for the easiest method of logging it.  There’s no hurry about it; you can do it when nothing else comes up to take you away.  But do it thoroughly, and to the best of your judgment, so I can file your reports for future reference when they are needed.”

“Where do you want us to begin?” asked Bob.

“Welton is the only big operator,” Thorpe pointed out, “so you’d better look over the timber adjoining or surrounded by his.  Then the basin and ranges above the Power Company are important.  There’s a fine body of timber there, but we must cut it with a more than usual attention to water supplies.”

This work Bob and Elliott found most congenial.  They would start early in the morning, carrying with them their compass on its Jacob’s-staff, their chain, their field notes, their maps and their axes.  Arrived at the scene of operations, they unsaddled and picketed their horses.  Then commenced a search for the “corner,” established nearly fifty years before by the dead and gone surveyor, a copy of those field notes now guided them.  This was no easy matter.  The field notes described accurately the location, but in fifty years the character of a country may change.  Great trees fall, new trees grow up, brush clothes an erstwhile bare hillside, fire denudes a slope, even the rocks and boulders shift their places under the coercion of frost or avalanche.  The young men separated, shoulder deep in the high brakes and alders of a creek bottom, climbing tiny among great trees on the open slope of a distant hill, clambering busily among austere domes and pinnacles, fading in the cool green depths of the forest.  Finally one would shout loudly.  The other scrambled across.