Oh, yes.  She had no illusions.  She was not weakly sentimental.  She looked at it all with wide-open eyes.  It was a well-paid animal life.  It was a life of eating well, of sleeping well, of gambling, and drinking, and licence.  But it was a life of such labour that only perfect physical creatures could face.

She felt that these folks were wage slaves in the crudest meaning of the words.  There was nothing for them beyond their daily life, which was wholly animal.  Of spirituality there was none.  Of future there was none.  Their leisure was given over to their pastimes, while ahead the future lay always threatening.  Stiffening muscles, disease, age.  The king of them all in his youth, in age would be abandoned and driven forth, weary in body, aching in limbs, a derelict in the ranks of the world’s labour.

She was gravely impressed by the things she saw, by the men she met.

Her summer had been an education which had stirred feelings and sympathies almost unguessed.  It was the father, she could scarcely remember, making himself known to her.  For all the ambitions firing her, the long, fascinating days in the forests of the Shagaunty had taught her of the existence of an “underdog,” who, in himself, was the foundation upon which the personal ambition of the more fortunate was achieved.  Without him to support the whole edifice of civilisation must crash to the ground, and life would go back again to the bosom of that Nature from which it sprang.

Her realisation inspired her with an added desire.  It was a desire coming straight from an honest, unsophisticated heart.  She registered a vow that whithersoever her ambitions might lead her, she would always remember the “underdog,” and work for his betterment and greater happiness.

“So you can only cut the stuff here within reach of our light haulage system?” Nancy demanded at last.  “The rest’s gone.  The real big stuff, I mean, down below in the valley.  We’re just driven to the plateau where the cut looks to me more like one in twenty than any better?”

Arden Laval left his position at the brink of the ravine.  He came back to the girl in her modish costume that seemed so out of place beside the rough clothing that Covered his body.

“Why, I guess that’s so,” he said.  “Still, it’s a deal better than one in twenty.”  He laughed.  “Sure.  If it wasn’t the darn booms ’ud need to go hungry.”

The man’s French temperament left him more than appreciative of the beauty he beheld.  But he was wondering.  He was searching his shrewd mind for the real explanation of Nancy’s presence in these forests.  To him it was amazing that the Skandinavia should send this girl, this good-looker, on a journey through their forests alone.  He would willingly have asked the question.  But he remembered her written commission, signed by Elas Peterman.  So he was left with no alternative but to yield the utmost respect.