Rod found work in a logging camp a thing that tried his vigorous young body to the utmost until he hardened somewhat to the task and learned what every manual laborer must learn,—to strike a gait he could hold all day and not one that sapped his energy in two hours. He found a relief he had not expected in physical exertion. He could stop thinking about Mary Thorn. He took to work as some men take to whisky when a dumb ache oppresses them or some haunting memory will not let them be. And Mary Thorn did haunt him so long as he could look across from Hawk's Nest at that weathered cedar house. He told himself that he was a fool to feel that way. But logic had nothing to do with feeling. Irrational or not, it existed. Something in him had burned up full flame. Love, the mating instinct, whatever it was, had settled upon an object and refused to be directed elsewhere. There was more than sex involved. He did not know precisely what else, but he was sure of something above and beyond the urge of the flesh, however strong that might be. Because he couldn't say to himself that there were other girls and be consoled. Another girl wouldn't do.
He couldn't rid himself of the notion that he and Mary Thorn were made for each other. His mind went questing forward and backward and verified the emotional prompting. They had been shaping their own destiny for years. Or was it being shaped for them? He couldn't decide. But he could trace some indefinable influence drawing them together since childhood. There had always been a subtle pleasure in being together, a community of personal interest, a flowing of thoughts and feelings along the same channel that transcended the material factors in their lives. The material factors were prying them apart now. Rod saw that. He knew Mary's inflexibility once she determined on a given course. He had beaten his will against that in simple, childish matters. She would not be driven. She would walk her own road. She had always been a silently determined, lovable little devil, Rod told himself sadly. She was herself uniquely, neither a pattern nor an echo, and he would have loved her for that alone in a world where girls were very largely patterns or echoes, armed for conquest in the arena of men with the sole weapon of their sex.
Rod would say to himself that she was wrong, that money and caste and social privilege made no difference. But his mind was too acute not to see that she was right. Where he differed from her, what he resented most was her conviction of the importance of these things to him. That resentment kept him away from Mary Thorn as much as her positive refusal. He was too much the youthful egotist not to believe he could ultimately break that down. But he did not wish to coerce her, even through her own affection, until he saw a breach in the Norquay wall through which they could walk together.
Meantime he sweated through the last of a hot July. Phil had obligingly supplied him with a "job."
"This working up from the bottom doesn't strike my fancy," Phil had observed. "But if you're keen on it, old kid, have your way. They're apt to give you a rather rough time, though."
Rod grinned at that. He stood now five foot eleven in his socks. One hundred and seventy pounds of bone, muscle and nerves perfectly coördinated. He had made every team in school that he tried for, and he knew what it was to undergo discipline, to withstand punishment. It only amused him (when it did not irritate)—this solicitude for his comfort—as if he were something to be marked "fragile," "handle with care," whenever he stepped outside his own well-ordered environment, where rights and privileges and precedence were so clearly defined they went unquestioned. His father's admonitions, Grove's unsolicited counsel about girls, Phil's prudent objection to his getting down to a logger's level. It was the first and only time Rod heard Phil voice the old caste shibboleth. It surprised him, but he made no comment. He had his own program. He did not mind what they said so long as they did not actively oppose. And if the loggers undertook to give him a "rough" time because he happened to be the owner's son, he expected both to learn and teach in the process.
His work began in a camp fifty miles northwest of the Euclataws, on Hardwicke Island. For a month he worked as a bucker, following up a falling crew to saw the felled trees into standard length logs. He pulled all day on the end of a crosscut saw. The woods about him resounded with the clink of axes, the whine of steel cable in iron blocks, the shrill tooting of donkey whistles, the shudder and thrash of great machines spooling up half a mile of twisted steel rope on revolving drums, dragging enormous logs as if they were toothpicks on a thread, shooting them down to salt water, whence by raft and towline they passed to the hungry saws of the town mills.
Rod loved the cool green forest. It made him a little sad sometimes to see it so ravished. Wherever the logger went with his axes and saws and donkey engines he left behind a desolation of stumps and broken saplings and torn earth. But Rod was no sentimentalist. He knew that humanity does not survive by beauty alone. Timber is a utility. It must serve its turn. Nevertheless the artist in him suffered now and then at the havoc,—as a sensitive man turned butcher may perhaps occasionally revolt at his killing trade, despite the fact that man is a meat-eating animal.
In this first month Rod found little of note beyond hard work and monotony. The camp was well-established, well-equipped, moving along an efficient routine. The crew was disciplined and orderly. They let Rod alone. Insensibly they seemed to realize that while he was among them he was not of them, and they neither rode him nor made him one of themselves. In this camp he learned something of logging operations, but little or nothing of the logger that was new.
With the dog days, however, Phil transferred him to a new camp nearer home, a new operation—lock, stock, and barrel—from the gray-mustached logging boss to the cookhouse flunkys. They were mustered on the Valdez shore a mile below Little Dent when Rod joined. A hundred men, half a dozen donkey engines on floats, drums and drums of flexible steel cable, scow-loads of lumber, tools, all the machinery and personnel gathered for a raid on the fir and cedar spreading over that hillside to the Granite Pool and beyond.