A southbound steamer sailed forty-eight hours later.  She backed away from the Wrangel wharf with Tommy waving his hand to his partner on the pierhead.  Thompson went back to their room feeling a trifle blue, as one does at parting from a friend.  But it was not the moodiness of uncertainty.  He knew what he was going to do.  He had simply got used to Tommy being at his elbow, to chatting with him, to knowing that some one was near with whom he could try to unravel a knotty problem or hold his peace as he chose.  He missed Tommy.  But he knew that although they had been partners over a hard country, had bucked a hard trail like men and grown nearer to each other in the stress of it, they could not be Siamese twins.  His road and Tommy’s road was bound to fork.  A man had to follow his individual inclination, to live his own life according to his lights.  And Tommy’s was for town and the business world, while his—­as yet—­was not.

So for the next four months Thompson lived and worked on a wooded promontory a few miles north of Wrangel, very near the mouth of the river down which he and Tommy Ashe had come to the sea.  He was housed with thirty other men in a bunkhouse of hand-split cedar; he labored every day felling and trimming tall slender poles for piling that would ultimately hold up bridges and wharves.  The crew was a cosmopolitan lot so far as nationality went.  In addition they were a tougher lot than Thompson had ever encountered.  He never quite fitted in.  They knew him for something of a tenderfoot, and they had not the least respect for his size—­until he took on and soundly whipped two of them in turn before the bunkhouse door, with the rest of the thirty, the boss and the cook for spectators.  Thompson did not come off scathless, but he did come off victor, although he was a bloody sight at the finish.  But he fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the camp.  And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him.  Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would be respected.

Along with this incidental light upon the ways of his fellow working-men he learned properly how to swing an axe; he grew accustomed to dragging all day on the end of a seven-foot crosscut saw, to lift and strain with a cant hook.  The hardening process, begun at Lone Moose, continued unceasingly.  If mere physical hardihood had been his end, he could easily have passed for a finished product.  He could hold his own with those broad-shouldered Swedes and Michigan loggers at any turn of the road.  And that was a long way for a man like Thompson to come in the course of twelve months.  If he could have been as sure of a sound, working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he would have been well satisfied.  Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like a carthorse.  Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?