"You can get all the dope you want on logging here, and be at home too," Phil pointed out. "This camp will run for years. We may have to put in a railroad to reach the farther limits."
"Are you going to cut all this Valdez timber?" Rod asked.
"That's the idea, I believe."
"We seem to be speeding up all around for some reason," he remarked, after a little. "I don't see why we should, but we are. This show very near doubles our force."
Nor could Rod see why, but he suspected Grove's financial expansion as the cause. Grove was shooting at millions. He talked quite casually now of major and minor operations, as if he were treating the body of commerce like a surgeon. The Norquay Trust was getting its fingers into every industrial pie from which a money plum could be extracted. Before the new camp had cut a stick Rod learned that ground was being broken in Phillips Arm for a pulp mill capitalized at two millions. The Norquay Trust was helping to finance the thing, handling the pulp company's bonds. It was to furnish an outlet for low-grade timber,—cheaply made newsprint. To Rod it seemed chiefly an excuse for some financial juggling and to strip a lovely valley of timber, to pollute a beautiful stretch of sea-floored inlet with waste from sulphurous acid bleaching vats.
It was all one to Rod, a part of the inevitability of things. He would have preferred to let Phillips Arm retain its beauty and solitude, its forested valley a home for deer and bear and coveys of grouse, its shining river the highway of salmon to their spawning grounds. He would have cut the Valdez timber last of all, because he liked to look south from Hawk's Nest on a slope of unbroken green. But he had no voice in the matter. If they chose to strip the granite ribs of the earth to their primal nakedness, not of necessity but for an ambitious man's profit, he could only shrug his shoulders. He had his own row to hoe. Rod was beginning to suspect that if Grove were a throwback to some coarse, high-handed animalistic type, he himself was something of a variation from the true Norquay strain. Like did not always produce like.
Here about him work went forward with a swing. A dozen carpenters wrought marvels of construction on shore, transforming raw lumber into bunk houses, cook shacks, office, blacksmith shop, commissary. The falling gangs kept intermittent shudders running through the hillsides above, where they threw down their daily score of great trees. The donkey engines hitched cables to stumps ashore, slid off their floats, hauled themselves puffing and grunting into the shadowy woods, black-bellied mechanical spiders drawing themselves along by a thread of twisted steel wire. A pile-driver crew with a two-ton steam hammer drove rows of sticks alongshore to enclose a booming ground. Another crew built a chute from tide-water to the first benchland. Men and powerful machinery directed with skill and energy wrought this transformation. In two weeks logs were plunging down the chute,—one hundred thousand board feet per diem.
It was all new; machinery from Washington shops—steel cable from England—tools from Welland Vale—a logging boss from Oregon—men from every corner of the earth. To Rod there was a dual advantage in this. He saw the technique of preparation pass through every stage, emerge from apparent confusion to orderly, foreseen results. On the personal side he was merely one man in a crew. There were no old hands to make it easier or harder for him because he was a Norquay. The logging boss was a man with a reputation for getting out timber. It was almost a religion with him. Rod marked him shrewdly. If Jim Handy had any hopes or ambitions beyond so many thousand feet per day brought to tide-water Rod never learned what they were. The man was a human logging machine. Other men commended themselves to him only in so far as they were efficient in the woods. To Handy, owners and owners' sons were subordinate to the job itself. He was the most perfect example of a single-track mind Rod Norquay had ever encountered.
But the crew as a whole had no such limitations. Rod fitted among them easily, discovering in himself new phases of adaptability, finding in the conglomerate mass as many angles of human interest as there are facets on a diamond. They were literate and illiterate, talkative and silent, coarse and fine. The bunk house echoed with everything from downright obscenity to analytical discussions of the entire social order. One didn't, he perceived with some surprise, have to graduate from a university to have ideas, to express them comprehensively, to examine life critically in its spiritual as well as in its material aspects. And out of the few who stood intellectually head and shoulders above the non-thinking ruck Rod came to know best and to like genuinely a man but two or three years older than himself.
Andy Hall was a high-rigger, an expert on steel cable, the manner of its placing, splicing, its capacity for strain, and its life in the humming blocks. He was short and compactly muscular with sandy hair and a clear blue eye that could be both quizzical and cold. His work was his work. He was paid to rig cable, and he did so, and did it well. But he was what he termed a class-conscious proletarian. Andy flew no red flags. He kept his nose between the covers of a book when he was through his work. But whosoever dragged him into discussion was apt to encounter the deluge. He had convictions which he voiced in unequivocal terms. His vocabulary was equally rich in terse colloquialisms and pure English.