Perhaps I am, but just the same I envy a fellow who can look that way when talking about his work."

"But you have a work, Wayne."

"No, I have a place."

She grew more and more puzzled. "Why, Wayne, you've been all wrapped up in this thing you were doing."

He threw his cigarette away impatiently. "Oh yes, just for the sake of doing it. I get a certain satisfaction in scheming things out. I must say, however, I'd like to scheme out something I'd get some satisfaction in having schemed out. A morsel of truth dropped from the mouth of a babe a minute ago. You may have observed, Katie, that his inquiry was more direct and reasonable than your reply. An improvement on a rifle. Not such a satisfying thing to leave to a rifle eliminating future."

"But I didn't know the army admitted it was to be a rifle eliminating future."

"I'm not saying that the army does," he laughed.

He passed again to that look of almost passionate concentration which Katie had always supposed meant metallic fouling or some--to her--equally incomprehensible thing. He emerged from it to exclaim tensely: "Oh I get so sick of the spirit of the army!"

Instinctively Katie looked around. He saw it, and laughed.

"There you go! We've made a perfect fetich of loyalty. It's a different sort of loyalty those forestry fellows have--a more live, more constructive loyalty. The loyalty that comes, not through form, but through devotion to the work--a common interest in a common cause. Ours is built on dead things. Custom, and the caste--I know no other word--just the bull-headed, asinine, undemocratic caste that custom has built up."

"And yet--there must be discipline," Katie murmured: it seemed dreadful Wayne should be tearing down their house in that rude fashion, house in which they had dwelt so long, and so comfortably.

"Discipline is one thing. Bullying's another. I've never been satisfied discipline couldn't be enforced without snobbery. To-day Solesby--one year out of West Point!--walked through a shop I was in. He passed men working at their machines--skilled mechanics, many of them men of intelligence, ideas, character--as though he were passing so much cattle.

I wanted to take him by the neck and throw him out!"

"Oh well," protested Katie, "one year out of the Point! He's yet to learn men are not cattle."

"Well, Leonard never learned it. His back gets some black looks, let me tell you."

"Wayne dear," she laughed, "I'm afraid you're not talking like an officer and a gentleman."

"I get tired talking like an officer and a gentleman. Sometimes I feel like talking like a man."

"But couldn't you be court-martialed for doing that?" she laughed.

"I think Leonard thinks I should be."

"Why--why, Wayne?"

"Because I talk to the men. There's a young mechanic who has been detailed to me, and he and I get on famously. All too famously, I take it Leonard thinks. He came in to-day when this young Ferguson was telling me some things about his union. He treated Ferguson like a dog and me like a suspicious character."

"Dear me, Wayne," she murmured, "don't get in trouble."

"Trouble!" he scoffed. "Well if I can get in trouble for talking with an intelligent man I'm working with about the things that man knows--then let me get in trouble! I'd rather talk to Ferguson than Solesby--we've more in common. Oh I'll get in no trouble," he added grimly. "Leonard knows it wouldn't sound well to say it. But he feels it, just the same.

Right there's the difference between our service and this forest service.

That's where they're democrats and we're fossils. Look at the difference in the spirit of the ranger and the spirit of the soldier! And it's not because they're whipped into line and bullied and snarled at. It's because they're treated like men--and made to feel they're a needed part of a big whole. You should hear Fred tell of the way men meet in this forest service--superintendent meeting ranger on a common ground. And why? Because they're doing something constructive. Because the work's the thing that counts. You'll see what it's done for Fred. The boy has a real dignity; not the stiff-necked kind he'd acquire around an army post, but the dignity that comes with the consciousness of being, not in the service, but of service."

He fell silent there, and Katie watched him. He had never spoken to her that way before--she had not dreamed he felt like that; heretofore it had been only through laughing little jibes at the army she had had any inkling of his feeling toward it. That she had not taken seriously; half the people she knew in the service jibed at it to others in the service.

This depth of feeling disturbed her, moved her to defense. After a moment's consideration she emerged triumphant with the Panama canal.

He shook his head. "When you consider the percentage of the army so engaged, you can't feel as happy about it as you'd like to. We ought all to be digging Panama canals!"

"Heavens, Wayne--we don't need them."

"Plenty of things we do need."

"Well I don't think you're fair to the army, Wayne. You're not looking into it--deeply enough. You're doing just as much as Fred, for in safeguarding the country you permit this constructive work to go on. As to our formalities--they have run off into absurdity at some points, but it was a real spirit created those very forms."

"True. And now the spirit's dead and the form's left--and what's so absurd as a form that rattles dead bones?"

"Father didn't feel as you do, Wayne."

"He had no cause to. He was needed. But we don't need the army on the frontier now. That's _done_. And we do need the forest service--the thing to build up. There's no use harking back to traditions. The world moves on too fast for that. Question is--not what did you do yesterday--but what good are you to-day--what are you worth to-morrow?

Oh, I'm not condemning the army half so much as I'm sympathizing with it," he laughed. "It's full of live men who want to be doing something--instead of being compelled to argue that they're some good.

They get very tired saying they're useful. They'd like to make it self-evident."

"Well, perhaps we'll have a war with Japan," said Katie consolingly.

"Perhaps we will. Having an army that's spoiling for it, I don't see how we can very well miss it."

"But if we had no army we certainly should have a war."

His silence led Katie to gasp: "Wayne, are you becoming--anti-militarist?"

He laughed. "Oh, I don't know what I'm becoming. But as to myself--I do know this. There would be more satisfaction in constructive work than in work that constructs only that it may be ready to destroy. I would find it more satisfying to help give my country itself--through natural and legitimate means--than stand ready to give it some corner of some other country."

"But to keep the other country from getting a corner of it?"

"Doesn't it occur to you, Katie, that as a matter of fact the other country might like a chance to develop its resources? We're like a crowd of boys with rocks in their hands and all afraid to throw down the rocks. If one did, the others might be immensely relieved. It seems rather absurd, standing there with rocks nobody wants to throw--especially when there are so many other things to be doing--and everybody saying, 'I've got to keep mine because he's got his.' Would you call that a very intelligent gang of kids? Ferguson says it's the workingmen of the world will bring about disarmament. That they're coming to feel their common cause as workers too keenly to be forced into war with each other."

"That's what the man that mends the boats says," piped up Worth. "He says that when they're all socialists there won't be any wars--'cause nobody'll go. But Watts says that day'll never come, thank God."

"Are you thanking God for yourself or for Watts, sonny?" laughed his father. "And who, pray, is the man that mends the boats?"

"The man that mends the boats, father, is a man that's 'most as smart as you are."

"It has been a long time," gravely remarked Wayne, "since any man has been brought to my attention so highly commended as that."

But their talk had been sobering to them both, for they spoke seriously then of various things. It was probable that before long Wayne would be ordered to Washington. He wanted to know what Katie would do then. Why not spend next season in Washington with him? Just what were her plans?

But Katie had no plans. And suddenly she realized how completely all things had been changed by the coming of Ann.

She had spent much of her life in Washington. She loved it; loved its official life, in particular its army and diplomatic life; and loved, too, that rigidly guarded old Washington to which, as her mother's daughter, the door stood open to her. Her uncle, the Bishop, lived in a city close by. His home was the fixed spot which Katie called home. In Washington--and near it--she would find friends on all sides. Just thirty days before she would have gloated over that prospect of next season there.

But she was not prepared to bombard Washington with Ann. The mere suggestion carried realization of how propitious things had been, how simple she had found it.

The little game they were playing seemed to cut Katie off from her life, too, and without leaving the luxury of feeling sorry for herself. With it all, Washington did not greatly allure. Washington, as she knew it, was distinctly things as they were; just now nothing allured half so much as those long dim paths of wondering leading off into the unknown.

Suddenly she had an odd sense of Washington--all that it represented to her--being the play, the game, the thing made to order and seeming very tame to her because she was dwelling with real things. It was as if her craft of make-believe was the thing which had been able to carry her toward the shore of reality.