If profits came to him, they would be honestly earned profits, the results of labor. He was not wasting as timber had been wasted before his day. Every scrap of wood that came into his mill was utilized. Modern machinery made possible a saving in timber that thirty years ago would have run into hundreds of millions of feet of pine, had the pioneer wasters availed themselves of it. Thin band-saws turned a minimum of each log into ashes; with them Jim got seven boards where old-time circular saws had been able to give but six. Resaws redeemed the slabs, took from them the finest gold of the timber which lay just under the bark. In other days slab-piles had been known to burn constantly for years, a savage waste. Sawdust, remnants of slabs, edgings furnished the fuel which gave him his power. Here was nothing of which to be ashamed; much to justify pride. Here was an enterprise a man might defend before the court of posterity. But if the mills ran to Jim’s satisfaction at first they did not improve as he demanded. In ten days from the beginning there swept over the plant a pestilence of mishaps, each mishap causing the shutdown of a department, sometimes of the whole mill. It did not abate, but continued maddeningly. The shrill toot of the little whistle which commanded the engineer to stop motion became a throb in a sore tooth to Jim. Each accident was small; the total of them reached dangerous magnitude. Jim called in Nelson, head millwright, and his superintendent, John Beam. They came wearing the faces of harried men. “In three days,” Jim said, shortly, “we’ve lost five hours in shut-downs. Why?” “Every night,” said Nelson, “we inspect every belt, every pulley, every gear, every machine. We make sure nothing is wrong—and next day a dozen things go wrong. “The last shut-down was for a split pulley on the main shaft. I went over that shaft last night myself. That pulley was as tight and sound as any pulley could be. And it twisted off this morning. We had to shut down yesterday to fix the main driving-belt. Four rivets had come loose and she’d have pulled clean apart. There wasn’t a sign of a loose rivet night before last—I’d take my oath on it.” He looked gloomily out of the window. The thing was twanging on his nerves as well as on Jim’s. “John and I aren’t trying to make excuses for ourselves. We’d be tickled to death to take the blame if we could only fix it on to ourselves. What makes me want to roll over and howl is that we can’t fix it any place. In spite of all we can do these things happen. It’s just as he says about what he’s seen. Things I know were sound and in perfect runnin’ condition at night goes wrong in the mornin’. And how in blazes are we goin’ to explain the nails?” “What nails?” Jim asked.