"A man would have pretty hard work to convince me that it is a science," broke in Barrett, with some contempt. "As near as I can find out, it's mostly guesswork, and poor guesswork at that."
"Well, the fact remains," hastened Wade, a little nettled by the curtness that had succeeded the timber baron's rather sentimental courtesy, "my boys have been studying forestry, and I have been keeping a bit ahead of them and helping them as I could. Now they need a little practical experience. But they are boys who are working their way through school, and as I had to do the same thing I'm taking an especial interest in them. They have been in your mills two summers."
"Why isn't it a good place for them to stay?" demanded Barrett. "They're learning a side of forestry there that amounts to something."
"The side that they want to learn is the side of the standing trees," persisted Wade, patiently. "I thought I could talk it over with you a little better than they. I hoped that such a large owner of timber land had begun to take interest in forestry and would, for experiment's sake, put these young men upon a section of timber land this summer and let them work up a map and a report that you could use as a basis for later comparison, if nothing else."
"What do you mean, that I'm going to hire them to do it--pay them money?" demanded the timber baron, fixing upon the young man that stare that always disconcerted petitioners. At that moment Wade realized why those men whom he had seen waiting in the outer office were gazing at the door of the inner room with such anxiety.
"The young men will be performing a real service, for they will plot a square mile and--"
"If there's any pay to it, I'd rather pay them to keep off my lands," broke in Barrett. "Forestry--"
He in turn was interrupted. The man who came in entered with manifest belief in his right to interrupt.
"Forestry!" he cried, taking the word off Barrett's lips--"forestry is getting your men into the woods, getting grub to 'em, hiring bosses that can whale spryness into human jill-pokes, and can get the logs down to Pea Cove sortin'-boom before the drought strikes. That's forestry! That's my kind. It's the kind I've made my money on. It's the kind John Barrett made his on. What are you doin', John--hirin' a perfesser?" The new arrival asked this in a tone and with a glance up and down Wade that left no doubt as to his opinion of "perfessers." "Are you one of these newfangled fellers that's been studyin' in a book how to make trees grow?" he demanded.