CHAPTER XI
Living as he did within the boundaries of Foraker's Folly, John Taylor's perspective was too close to yield a comprehensive picture of the whole. He had heard the forest spoken of derisively in Pancake, had heard men of the crew who worked in it and about the mill talk disparagingly of the property. But these comments had been standardized, the voicing of ideas of long standing, and had contained no detail. It was a foregone conclusion in the community that the project was the venture of a visionary and destined to fail. Most men found satisfaction in this belief. For long ago they, or older men they respected, had forecasted such a calamity.
Taylor knew that some of the pine was cut each winter but that the trees taken out were not harvested for their own value but for the good that their removal would do those which were left; cripples, the unthrifty or the light gluttons only, were taken. Banks of these still flanked the mill which, before it commenced to saw the hardwood, was busied making these logs into thin box lumber and lath. Pulp-wood bolts had been shipped, he knew, and cars of small slabs and edging for fuel. Of what was cut, there was no waste.
He knew of the nursery behind the big house where seeds were taken from cones and planted and the seedlings removed to long furrows where they progressed a year before being transplanted to those places where trees were not thick enough on the ground. Black Joe had charge of the nursery and John had watched him at his work evenings and in those days when he was not needed elsewhere, had heard the old fellow muttering to the baby pines as he fussed over them with pride and tenderness.
As the days grew fair and less rain fell he learned of the fear of fire. Beside Helen's house Watch Pine reared itself, a great old tree, five feet through at the butt, rising straight and true for seventy feet before it flung its tattered banners to the air, a dignified veteran, standing above and guarding over that younger generation of its kind. Beneath the branches a crow's nest had been built, and up the trunk was a stout ladder. On dry days some one was on watch there through the hours of daylight, scanning the forest and adjacent country with a glass for the smoke which would herald danger.
But these were high points of information, unrelated, largely meaningless.
It was a few days after his first cars of lumber had rolled out of the siding at Seven Mile that John came upon Sim Burns in the woods. The new supervisor was walking along a fire line, note book in hand, pacing carefully and counting trees, and did not see Taylor until they were close together.
"Hello, Mr. Taylor," he said in his harsh voice, and sniffed. "How are th' logs turnin' out?"
"Well enough," John said.
"Makin' up th' tax rolls," Burns volunteered. "Just lookin' over this piece.
"My goodness, but this property has been let off easy! Taxes on this'll come in handy for roads an' a new court house."
"I suppose taxes on this stuff do run high."
"High! My goodness, she ain't paid anything like she should have paid. You see, our county's been run by old men. They never come in here to make their valuation. They told Foraker when he started he couldn't grow timber as a crop; they've stuck to that idea. No progress, Mr. Taylor, no progress. This piece has always been taxed just like waste land. Assessed for four dollars an acre last year an' look at it," with a wave of his long, dirty hand. "I'll bet this piece right here'll go twenty thousand to the acre right today!"
"No!"
"Sure! Ask anybody. An' four dollars an acre! My goodness, it's worth twenty-five dollars a thousand stumpage to any man. You ought to be interested, Mr. Taylor, now that you are one of our tax payers."
Indeed John was interested, but not because he owned forty acres of cut-over land in Blueberry County. He left Burns abruptly and went on, staring incredulously into the pine. Twenty thousand to the acre, and twenty-five dollars a thousand stumpage!
There were ten thousand acres of pine here, he knew. Ten thousand times—
He gave a whistle of amazement. The figures mounted dizzily. He stopped dead still in his tracks. What a property!
And Helen was in a corner. He recalled the threat of taxation that Burns had made that first night, remembered Milt Goddard's prediction of failure the next morning; remembered, also, the girl's words, as she told her foreman that the pinch was coming, that the hardest time was at hand for Foraker's Folly.
Why not? he asked himself. She had helped him—this was a property to stir the most sluggish of imaginations. His imagination, his ambition was mounting. His paltry few logs would be sawed within three weeks—and then, what?
He thought back to Old Luke, of how he revered the Michigan forests which he had subdued; surely he had made his father see that he was not afraid to work, not above grubbing; as surely, he felt, his father would now stand ready to back him—would be as willing to help him as he had been ready to impose upon his helplessness with a cruel practical joke.
He walked on slowly, thinking, multiplying and losing his breath again before the ascending totals—" It will help her, when she needs help," he told himself. "I don't know what she needs, just—but—And if I could help her there'd be no obligation; and with no obligation I wouldn't feel small—and then, perhaps—"
He stopped his thinking aloud as a flush came into his cheeks. In his eyes was a light of ambition which had nothing to do with trees and logs and dollars and once more that creep went over his body as it had when he first heard the partridge drumming for his mate—
That evening John wrote a second letter to his father, longer, containing references to detail that he knew were intelligent references. The last paragraph read:
"By the way, how much backing would you give me if I could come to you with a chance to get behind several thousand acres of Michigan white pine that will go, say, twenty thousand to the acre?"
He sent that letter to Pancake by Goddard who took it with a surly nod; then John lighted his pipe and walked the river's bank to dream and see rising before him a future of incredible glory—
Little did he reckon the fires of avarice that would be lighted by what he had written, the thwarted impulses which would be touched to life again! Little did he dream of the misery that would follow in its wake, of the heartsickness, the desperation, the regret. He could not see himself friendless, caught in a net of chicanery and ruthless plotting, with the joy of this night wiped out by the unhappiness that was to come!