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
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