e
donkey had skidded out the logs. And there was the engine puffing and
straining, and the steel cables running away among the trees, spooling
up on the drums, whining and whistling in the iron sheaves. It was like
war, Thompson thought, that purposeful activity, the tremendous forces
harnessed and obedient to man--only these were forces yoked to man's
needs, not to his destruction.

They lingered awhile watching the crew work, chatted with them in spare
moments. Then Carr led Thompson away through the woods again, and
presently took him across another stretch of stumps where men were
drilling and blasting out the roots of the ravished trees, on to fields
where grain and grass and root crops were ripening in the September sun,
and at last by another cluster of houses to the bank of the river again.
Here Carr sat down on a log, and began to fill a pipe.

"Well," he said, "what do you think of it?"

"For eighteen months' work you have made an astonishing amount of
headway," Thompson observed. "This is hard land to clear."

"Yes," Carr admitted. "But it's rich land--all alluvial, this whole
valley. Anything that can be grown in this latitude will grow like a
village scandal here."

He lighted his pipe.

"I tried high living and it didn't agree with me," Carr said abruptly.
"I have tried a variety of things since I left the North, and none of
them has seemed worth while. I'm not a philanthropist. I hate
charitable projects. They're so damned unscientific--don't you think
so?"

Thompson nodded.

"You know that about the time you left, discharged soldiers were
beginning to drift back," Carr continued. "Drift is about the word. The
cripples of war will be taken care of. Their case is obvious, too
obvious to be overlooked or evaded. But there are returned men who are
not cripples, and still are unfit for military duty. They came back to
civilian existence, and a lot of them didn't fit in. The jobs they could
get were not the jobs they could do. As more and more of them came home
the problem grew more and more acute. It is still acute, and I rather
think it will grow more acute until the crisis comes with the end of the
war and God knows how many thousands of men will be chucked into civil
life, which cannot possibly absorb them again as things are going at
present. It's a problem. Public-spirited men have taken it up. The
government took the problem of the returned soldier into consideration.
So far as I know they ar