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.