"I follow the wise course of greater folk," he said musingly. "Your people own miles and miles of timber, for instance. Yet they don't fill the woods with loggers and market every stick that can be cut. They log enough each year to bring in the necessary revenue. Isn't that about it?" "Probably. I really don't know the family policy about timber, though." "That's about it, I'd say," Thorn went on. "And mine, although it looks like a lazy man's tactics, is much the same. I bought this stretch of timber cheaply. By and by, when the time is ripe, I'll log it off or sell it to a logger. I'm doing just what the founder of your family did, Rod, and what your family continues to do. I'm holding property that will steadily increase in value." He stopped to pick up his pipe and put a match to it. Then he continued in his slow, drawling voice. "People have often thought me either a sluggard or a fool to sit tight here, as I've done. Some men would throw a crew of loggers in here, rip the heart out of this limit in a season, make twenty or thirty thousand dollars, and go somewhere else to do the same thing. Your pushing, bustling kind of man who doesn't see anything in the woods but so many thousand board feet per acre--that kind of man thinks I'm a damned fool." "The fact is," he resumed, after a brief pause in this, the longest speech Rod ever heard him make, "I have no expensive social position to maintain, and I'm not keen to pile up a fortune. A reasonable amount of work is good for my liver. But working under pressure, driving other men, worrying over deals and prices and costs and contracts is not only distasteful to me, but I'm not good at it. I know because I did it for fifteen years. I not only didn't like it, but I didn't make money."