Rod found himself half in agreement just then. There was not and had never been in his mind any doubt of the courage, energy, and usefulness of the first Norquays. The original Roderick had reaped for himself and his followers the reward of enterprise initiated by himself. He had handed on his winnings. So far as Rod could see, there was no great virtue in merely standing pat and holding on,—resting on dead men's accomplishments. That was a bog he determined his feet should never sink into. Grove, for instance, was not standing pat. Yet curiously, he had always thought of Grove and the Norquay Trust as a dubious undertaking,—dubious in character and uncertain as to outcome. By all the conventional signs and tokens he was wrong. Grove was certainly moving with purposeful intent. He was a dynamo for energy. Already he was credited with stupendous achievements. But to Rod that seemed a great deal worse than the gentlemanly laissez faire which his father had set as a standard.
"Oh, damn, I wish it were spring again," Rod muttered as he strode down the hill.
Spring was at hand almost before he realized that the vernal equinox had come and gone. But winter had to precede spring. In October the fall rains broke in bitter earnest. The sodden drip of eaves lulled him to sleep at night and greeted him on awakening. He went to work in the morning with his fellows and trudged back at night soaked through heavy clothing. The bunk house reeked with steam from sodden garments festooned above a red-hot stove. Day and night, for weeks on end, gray clouds and drifting mist hovered above the trees. Every gully discharged a stream seaward. To step through a clump of brush meant a shower bath. Everything a man touched, tools, gear, timber, was damp and clammy cold. The thin soil squashed into mud under their boots. The moss was saturated. The great firs dripped like weeping giants. Even the old hands on the coast began to remark profanely that there had never been such rains.
Yet the logs came down. The falling gangs went grumbling into the wet thickets about the base of the trees they must fell. The rigging-slingers and hook tenders cursed as they fumbled the slippery cables. Donkey engineers scowled from beneath the tin shelter over each machine. And Jim Handy prowled in oilskins from gang to gang, silent, eagle-eyed, on the job. Rain or shine the timber came log by log to the booming ground, the boom men with their pikes arranged it in sections, and when the sections grew to a thirty-swifter raft, a tug hauled in, hooked on her towline and the cedar and fir of Valdez began its journey to the mills.
During those sodden weeks Rod Norquay put by all that he had ever been. His work, that opus which had led him to forswear, however briefly, the ease and comfort of Hawk's Nest, was laid away. Not forgotten. He sat sometimes in the evening, dreaming. He had wanted to see what made the wheels go round, to know how and why men labored and endured privation, to see what life was like in the raw. And he was getting insight with a vengeance. He saw men throw down their tools in a passion and quit at a word. He saw new men reel drunkenly down a steamer's gangplank and go to work next morning with aching heads and bloodshot eyes. He saw a snap phrase bring a blow, a fight to a finish. The whole panorama of the timber, trees, men, machinery, shifted before his eyes that winter, gave him food for thought as well as sometimes a flash of something that stirred his pulse. For there were heroic moments, risks, long chances taken and skilfully avoided. A flying limb, a snapped cable, a rolling log. A man had to be alert. It was no place for a dullard. The logger had his pride of calling. It was borne in upon Rod that only tried men followed the woods. It was something of a satisfaction that he qualified as one of them on the job.
It was not so regarded in the family circle, he discovered to his secret amusement. Grove openly disliked the idea of any Norquay mixing with the men. Norquay senior observed dryly that Rod need not make quite so close a contact with logging and loggers. Phil frankly invited him on different occasions to come in out of the wet.
At the Christmas shutdown, foregathered at Grove's house in town, Rod noted the growing concern on his behalf. There was a hint of protest in the jocular remarks about his devotion to logging as a vocation. Grove's thinly veiled contempt, Laska's mild wonder that he should go in for "that sort of thing" nettled Rod.
He sat back, appraising his father, his brothers, the friends of the family, the train of people who came within range of his observation, all well-to-do, all thoroughly insulated against material discomfort, able to command and have their commands obeyed without question. They were as supreme in their respective positions as Jim Handy was on the Valdez job,—more so, because Handy's power was only delegated to him, and these people Rod knew, wealthy merchants, financiers, propertied magnates of various sorts, held their power in their own individual right.
He wondered if they knew their power and how far the roots of such power penetrated the social soil, if they had grasped it with clear purpose and sure intent; and if they would have the resource and determination to keep it when they were challenged by what they called the "rabble"? Rod wondered. There might never be such a challenge. Andy Hall doubted the possibility within several generations. But Rod himself was not so sure. He had none of the purblind middle-class hatred of and contempt for labor agitators, those sometimes sincere and sometimes hypocritical mouthpieces of the muddled aspirations of the wage-workers. Rod had a working knowledge of economics, a trained understanding of cause and effect in the world of industry, in the field of production and distribution. He was without prejudice, and he knew what he knew. Men like Andy Hall, when they did not claw up out of the class where they originated, remained within it and festered. They could never be servilely contented. They had too much force, too positive a character. Their perception was too keen.
It amused Rod to speculate on how his father and Grove, the Deanes, Walls, Richstons, et al would fare if they were ever faced with a situation in which they would have to black their own boots, prepare and serve their own food, wear overalls instead of tailored clothes. They couldn't. That was his cynical conclusion. They wouldn't know how. And they had an attitude which could only be translated as contempt for those who did know how. Somehow, by the grace of God, or chance, or skilful management, they had become entrenched behind material fortifications, their hands grasping the strings of an ample purse. And from behind these fortifications they looked out with narrowed eyes upon lesser folk.