In this first month Rod found little of note beyond hard work and monotony. The camp was well-established, well-equipped, moving along an efficient routine. The crew was disciplined and orderly. They let Rod alone. Insensibly they seemed to realize that while he was among them he was not of them, and they neither rode him nor made him one of themselves. In this camp he learned something of logging operations, but little or nothing of the logger that was new. With the dog days, however, Phil transferred him to a new camp nearer home, a new operation--lock, stock, and barrel--from the gray-mustached logging boss to the cookhouse flunkys. They were mustered on the Valdez shore a mile below Little Dent when Rod joined. A hundred men, half a dozen donkey engines on floats, drums and drums of flexible steel cable, scow-loads of lumber, tools, all the machinery and personnel gathered for a raid on the fir and cedar spreading over that hillside to the Granite Pool and beyond. "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.