But the crew as a whole had no such limitations. Rod fitted among them easily, discovering in himself new phases of adaptability, finding in the conglomerate mass as many angles of human interest as there are facets on a diamond. They were literate and illiterate, talkative and silent, coarse and fine. The bunk house echoed with everything from downright obscenity to analytical discussions of the entire social order. One didn't, he perceived with some surprise, have to graduate from a university to have ideas, to express them comprehensively, to examine life critically in its spiritual as well as in its material aspects. And out of the few who stood intellectually head and shoulders above the non-thinking ruck Rod came to know best and to like genuinely a man but two or three years older than himself. Andy Hall was a high-rigger, an expert on steel cable, the manner of its placing, splicing, its capacity for strain, and its life in the humming blocks. He was short and compactly muscular with sandy hair and a clear blue eye that could be both quizzical and cold. His work was his work. He was paid to rig cable, and he did so, and did it well. But he was what he termed a class-conscious proletarian. Andy flew no red flags. He kept his nose between the covers of a book when he was through his work. But whosoever dragged him into discussion was apt to encounter the deluge. He had convictions which he voiced in unequivocal terms. His vocabulary was equally rich in terse colloquialisms and pure English. "Where did you go to school, Andy?" Rod asked him one Sunday morning. They were lounging in the shade of a branchy maple left standing beside the bunk house. Rod had been listening to Andy outline the theory of evolution to an argumentative Swede with a Lutheran complex. Andy grinned. "School of experience," said he. "University of life and books. Never graduated. Never will. Always be a student--gettin' plucked now and then. No," he hunched up his knees and smiled amiably at Rod, "I never had the advantage of being formally labelled as an educated man. You're a McGill man, I understand. Find it helps much on the job?" "Not on the job as a job," Rod answered. "Still, it helps to give me a certain slant at things which pertain to the job. For sheer physical labor you might say a university training is waste. At the same time--" "What are you doing on the job, anyway?" Andy inquired with blunt directness, although good-naturedly. "You don't have to. Why don't you go play with the rest of the butterflies?" "I want to see what makes the wheels go round," Rod repeated the only reason he ever gave. The high-rigger jolted him with his reply.