“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.”