"Watershed!" snorted Baker. "Rot! If every stick of timber was cleaned off these mountains, I'd get the water just the same."
"Baker," said Bob to this. "You go and take a long, long look at your bathroom sponge in action, and then come back and I'll talk to you."
Baker contemplated his friend for a full ten seconds. Then his fat, pugnacious face wrinkled into a grin.
"Stung on the ear by a wasp!" he cried, with a great shout of appreciation. "You merry, merry little josher! You had me going for about five minutes."
Bob let it go at that.
"I suppose you won't be able to pay over twenty per cent. this next year, then?" he inquired, with an amused expression.
"Twenty per cent.!" cried Baker rolling his eyes up. "It's as much as I can do to dig up for improvements and bond interest and the preferred."
"Not to mention the president's salary," amended Bob.
"But I've got 'em where they live," went on Baker, complacently, without attention to this. "You don't catch Little Willie scattering shekels when he can just as well keep kopecks. They've left a little joker in the pack." He produced a paper-covered copy of the new regulations, later called the Use Book. "They've swiped about everything in sight for these pestiferous reserves, but they encourage the honest prospector. 'Let us develop the mineral wealth,' says they. So these forests are still open for taking up under the mineral act. All you have to do is to make a 'discovery,' and stake out your claim; and there you are!"
"All the mineral's been taken up long ago," Bob pointed out.