It could be done. It wanted doing. Rod had always wanted to do it. Unconsciously he had been preparing for the task. He had meant to do something like that ever since a day when he had laid down his book and told his tutor that some one ought to write the Iliad of the pioneers, an epic of the men and women who with vision and high courage had tamed a wild land for their children's children, those bold spirits who shrank from nothing by land or sea that promised a reward for enterprise. Rod thought he knew why there was no magic in his pen, why these magnificent visions eluded capture. It was not a reasoned conviction. He felt his lack instinctively. The first faint labor pains of creative effort apprised him of his need: to plunge into the agitated pool of life instead of viewing it from a distant eminence. That was how the manner of life he had led from childhood struck him now,--as a view from afar. Rod was sophisticated enough to realize that his world was one exclusively occupied by a limited number of fortunate people, holding their preëminence largely by sheer inertia. Statistics, observation, his university delving in economics and sociology, had informed him that for one very wealthy family there were a hundred subsisting in various degrees of comfort, a thousand but a step beyond poverty. Accident of birth, or inherent superiority? How was he to know? How could he know unless he got outside the fences, inhibitions, the unyielding rigidity of his own class? It was rigid, Rod perceived; although that perception had only become clear to him through Mary Thorn's eyes. It had a fetich of superiority which might or might not be valid. Even aside from that, how could he fathom things that were universal above and apart from class and even race--men's hopes and fears and aspirations--unless he established a contact with men? And Rod's instinct, the wise, fundamental instinct of an unwarped nature, urged him to make that contact first among the lowly, where the sweat and strain was greatest. There was the raw material. The Norquays--a little more perhaps than any of their circle--were the finished product. Rod wanted to know the process--and the by-products. That was why he chose the woods. It might be well to know timber. But it was better to know men. And the way to know men was to live among them, to work with them, to stand with them--if such a thing were possible--upon a common ground. Afterward--he would know what he knew. So for himself Rod, at the age of twenty-two, defined the approach to knowledge: through experience--plus imagination. And to him it seemed that with the first rebuff life had dealt him, it had also given him a clarified purpose, a definite mark to shoot at. CHAPTER X