lity, become a valuable clerk--later, a
lumber salesman at a good salary and better commissions.

"Your duties will not be strenuous, and as you enlarge your
acquaintance you will naturally assume the social position to which you
are entitled.

"Or I can use you in the woods. Send you into a logging camp to learn
the business where it starts. Up there the work is not easy. Instead of
a salary you will receive wages--and you will earn them--every cent of
them. There are no snap jobs in a logging camp. Everybody, from the
boss down, works--and works hard. Instead of roast lamb and green peas
you will eat salt pork and baked beans.

"You will be called a lumberjack--a social pariah. Your associates will
be big men--some good and some bad--bad as they make them--and all
rough. Good and bad, they would rather fight than eat, and they would
rather watch others fight than fight.

"In summer you can loaf and blow in your wages, or you can go into the
mills and learn how lumber is made--learn to tell at a glance whether a
log will saw to the best profit into bridge timber or lath.

"It is no sinecure--the life of the logging camp. A hundred times you
will be called upon to face battle, murder, and sudden death, and it
will be up to you to make good.

"In the office I have clerks who will be found at the same desk twenty
years from now. And in the woods I have hundreds of swampers, skidders,
and sawyers who will always be swampers, skidders and sawyers. I have
camp bosses who will always be camp bosses, and a few who will become
lumbermen.

"But the man who comes up through that school is the man who learns the
game--the man who eventually will sit behind locked doors and talk in
millions, while the office-made salesman is out on the road dickering
in car-loads."

He paused and relighted his cigar.

"And you are offering me the choice of these jobs?"

"Just so. Take your time. Think it over carefully and give me your
answer in the morning."

"I have already made up my mind. If it is just the same to you I will
go to the woods. I need the exercise," he grinned.

"By the way, you have not told me your name."

"Bill," he answered, and watched the blue smoke curl upward from the
end of his cigar.

"Bill what?" Appleton regarded him through narrowing lids.

"Bill," he repeated. "Just Bill, for the present--and no references.
Sometime--if I make good, perhaps--but surely Bill ought to be name
enough for a lumberjack