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“If you’ll stay a month, I’ll show you.”
A month! Strange wondered whether he could endure it a week. It was not the wilderness that got on his nerves; for all his life he had been a solitary man, brooding alone over plans and power. He was used to the “Come, and he cometh; go, and he goeth” of Rome’s centurion, with reason neither asked nor given. Difference of opinion was a trumpet-call to battle, in which the strongest will won. There were men, such as Grim and Ramsden, whom he hired to tell the truth to him and to apply their brains. To them he listened, but always of his own free will, with a feeling he was getting something for his money. This man, who did not even own the forest, yet was so visibly unimpressed by the power of invested millions, irritated him.
“This timber’s growing to waste here,” he said abruptly.
“The next generation will need it,” said Ommony.
“The next generation will govern themselves, let’s hope.”
“Yes, we all hope that.”
It was on the tip of Strange’s tongue to say something discourteous about the British having not so long to rule in India.
But it filtered vaguely though his mind that Ommony wouldn’t care, and he knew better, from experience, than to waste sharp comment on indifference.
“Then why grow trees for them?” he asked.
“Why not?” said Ommony.
Strange could not answer him, or saw the uselessness of answering. He was cheek by jowl with a fanatic, it seemed to him, and he made a praise-worthy effort to change the flow of thought.
“Well, let’s shoot a tiger,” he said abruptly. “You promised me one at breakfast. Are they as dangerous as they’re said to be, or is that another of these——”
“The one I’ll let you shoot is,” Ommony answered; and Strange looked at him sharply again, aware of a hidden meaning, or a double meaning—something he detested. Yet he couldn’t lay his finger on it.
“How so?” he demanded.
“Tigers are like people. Decent tigers are like decent people, only on a lower plane. They only kill for food, and let alone what they can’t use. A few of them are greedy, and kill too much. Some are lazy, and kill cattle, which is stealing. Sometimes you can drive those and make them go to work. They’ve a right to be tigers, just as we’ve a right to be men; left to themselves, but watched, they work out a destiny that possibly we can’t understand. Now and then I think I understand it. They turn criminal at times, though. Man-killers. Nobody’s fault but theirs then. Short shrift.”
“You’re after a man-killer?”
“Yes.”
“This morning?”
“Get him within the month,” said Ommony.
Strange was more than ever puzzled.
“I should think you’d put your whole force on a man-killer. Go after him, and get him before he can do any more harm. Why not?”
“If you have him where he can’t do harm, why hurry?” answered Ommony.
“Oh, you have him rounded up where he can’t escape?”
“He might escape, but I hope not. No. I didn’t round him up. He wandered out of his territory into an environment that he thinks he understands, but doesn’t. We’ll have fun with him.”
“I should call that dangerous.”
“Perhaps. For him. He won’t kill men while we have him under observation. This is the look-out rock.”
Ommony sent the staghound first up the well worn track that circled to the summit, to make sure there were no bears or leopards to misinterpret the intrusion. He went next, springing up quickly, leaving Strange to scramble slowly after him. He had talked all the tiger he chose to just then.
For about five minutes, panting on the summit, Strange took in the view of a forest like a raging sea arrested in mid-turmoil. Waves and waves of green, and purple where the shadows were, so shook, and seemed to plunge, in the breath of a light wind that a man could think dead tree-tops were the rigging of sunken ships. There were rocks like islands. On the far horizon was a bank of clouds for shore. Kites wheeled like darkened sea-gulls; and the murmur of the wind among the trees was like the voice of “many-sounding ocean.”
Size—all enormousness—was something that appealed to Meldrum Strange. He could think in millions as he stood there, and it pleased him. Sight of all those myriads of living things, governed, as he sensed it, by one man, there for one purpose, under his hand, available, awaiting one word by a man with brains, to be swept into the jaws of Titan-industry and pulped, sawed, planed, bent into profitable use by folk who couldn’t grow a tree or even buy a whole one—thrilled him.
“How many of these were here when you came?” he demanded.
“Very few. Just scattered copses.”
“Grew them all, eh?”
“No, they grew themselves. Nature attends to all that, if you coax her.”
“This ’ud be a good place to start an industry. This interests me. I must interview the Government about it. Cheap labor. A railway. Only a hundred miles or so from the coast. We could ship this stuff. No small proprietors to bother with. It looks like opportunity. What’s the Government thinking of, I wonder?”
“The next generation,” said Ommony.
“Good Lord, man! The British won’t be here. There’ll be an Indian government by that time, grafting and playing politics. They’ll waste, destroy, ruin——”
“That’s their lookout. It won’t be cut in my day.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Strange was himself again. He stood with arms folded on his breast and the old light burning in his eyes—devouring light, that could not see use in unexploited profit. His brain was already figuring in terms of import duties, labor, and exchange—sea-freight—subsidies—and a market where the men who put in number nineteen bolts all day long must have what they can pay for ready-made.
He looked again at Ommony—made a new appraisal. Mad, of course. A fanatic. Yet a man of one idea is like a horse in harness. You can use him. He can be a strong cog in the intricate machine. The punishing grind, that kills or makes a rebel of the fellow who can see both sides of anything, only spurs a fanatic to further effort He might use Ommony. No doubt flattery——
“A man needs genius at this business, as at everything else, if he’s to succeed. You’re wasted here now. You’ve done it. You should go ahead. A man on half your salary could carry on, while you devote yourself to——”
“That’s my ambition,” Ommony interrupted. He was tired already of the subject Strange had broached. “I’d like to spend my whole time studying trees. But my plan would cost too much.”
“There’s no such thing as too much, if it’s a sound plan,” Strange assured him.
“The Government’s hard up. Can’t afford experiments. They’d listen to me if they had the money, but India’s poor.”
“Good Lord! Turn this into money then!”
“Trees have never been studied properly. As you see, they grow themselves, given a chance and the right location. My theory is that all the waste land in the world might be turned into forests at very small expense, if we only took the right precautions first and studied the thing from the beginning. It’s the first part—travel, observation, comparative analysis, experiment on a sufficient scale—that would prove too costly.”
Strange made a motion