"Young man, I can use you. If you are foot-loose and are willing to work, I will give you your chance. I am going to put it up to you straight and let you decide for yourself.
"I can use you in my office at a very fair salary. In two or three years you will, in all probability, become a valuable clerk—later, a lumber salesman at a good salary and better commissions.
"Your duties will not be strenuous, and as you enlarge your acquaintance you will naturally assume the social position to which you are entitled.
"Or I can use you in the woods. Send you into a logging camp to learn the business where it starts. Up there the work is not easy. Instead of a salary you will receive wages—and you will earn them—every cent of them. There are no snap jobs in a logging camp. Everybody, from the boss down, works—and works hard. Instead of roast lamb and green peas you will eat salt pork and baked beans.
"You will be called a lumberjack—a social pariah. Your associates will be big men—some good and some bad—bad as they make them—and all rough. Good and bad, they would rather fight than eat, and they would rather watch others fight than fight.
"In summer you can loaf and blow in your wages, or you can go into the mills and learn how lumber is made—learn to tell at a glance whether a log will saw to the best profit into bridge timber or lath.
"It is no sinecure—the life of the logging camp. A hundred times you will be called upon to face battle, murder, and sudden death, and it will be up to you to make good.
"In the office I have clerks who will be found at the same desk twenty years from now. And in the woods I have hundreds of swampers, skidders, and sawyers who will always be swampers, skidders and sawyers. I have camp bosses who will always be camp bosses, and a few who will become lumbermen.
"But the man who comes up through that school is the man who learns the game—the man who eventually will sit behind locked doors and talk in millions, while the office-made salesman is out on the road dickering in car-loads."
He paused and relighted his cigar.