§ 136 The Low-Down on the Saw-Milling Business
An office-man for a Chicago lumber concern decided to get into the business on his own account. Sight unseen, he purchased a milling property in the White River bottoms of Arkansas at a figure which seemed to him highly attractive. He settled up his affairs in the city and caught a train for the South to take over the bargain.
At a way-station on the edge of a swamp he left the cars. The man from whom he had purchased, a lean, whiskered individual, met him with a team and a buckboard, and together they started on the long drive back in the country. As they bumped along over the corduroy road the Northern man turned to his companion and said:
“I’m hoping to make a good deal of money out of this new line and I’m trusting to you to put me onto the ropes. I know something about the selling end of the game but this is going to be my first experience in the actual getting out of the raw stock.”
“Well, suh,” said the late proprietor, “I’ll give you my own experiences in the saw-mill business and then you kin draw yore own conclusions. This yere mill I sold you didn’t cost me nary cent to begin with. When my father-in-law died he left it to me all complete and clear of debt.
“Labor ain’t cost me nothin’ because my two boys and me do all the work and we ain’t never had to hire no outside help. And the timber we’ve cut ain’t cost nothin’ neither ’cause, just between you and me, we been sort o’ stealin’ it off the land of a rich Yankee who owns a big stretch of the bottoms and ain’t got nobody watchin’ it.
“I’ve also been kind of favored in the matter of shipments, seein’ that my cousin is district freight-agent for the railroad and he fixes up things so our freightin’ don’t amount to nothin’ at all.
“That’s the way she stands—no wages for outside hands, no cost for timber, and practically nothin’ for freight bills.
“And last year I lost twenty-five hundred dollars.”