had better get out, go somewhere, get down to
work, be at his fixed purpose of proving his mettle upon an obdurate
world, and get her out of his mind in the process. He couldn't tune his
whole existence to a sentimental craving for any woman--even such a
woman as Sophie. He would, in the moment of such emotional genuflexions,
have dissented with cynical bitterness from the poetic dictum that it
was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Spurred by this mood he acted instinctively rather than with reasoned
purpose. He gave up his room, packed his clothes and betook himself upon
a work-seeking pilgrimage among the small, interior towns.

He left San Francisco in March. By May he had circulated all through the
lower San Joaquin and farther abroad to the San Juan, and had turned his
face again toward San Francisco Bay. At various jobs he had tried his
hand, making a living such as it was, acquiring in addition thereto a
store of first-hand experience in the social and monetary values of
itinerant labor. He conceded that such experience might somehow be of
use to a man. But he had had enough of it. He had a feeling of having
tested California for his purposes--and of finding it wanting.

He had made up his mind to double on his tracks, to go north again,
specifically to British Columbia, partly because Tommy was there,
chiefly because Vancouver was a growing place on the edge of a vast,
newly opened interior. He knew that if no greater thing offered, from
that center there was always the avenue of the woods. He could qualify
in that line. And in the woods even a common axeman exacted and received
more democratic treatment than in this older region where industry ran
in fixed channels, where class lines were more rigidly drawn, where
common labor was cheap and unprivileged.

He hadn't been getting on in those three months. He had less money than
when he started out--about enough now to get him up North and leave a
hundred dollars or so for emergencies. No, decidedly he wasn't getting
on--he was going down, he told himself. It dismayed him a little. It
wasn't enough to be big and strong and willing. A mule could be that.
The race was not to the swift or the strong. Not in modern industry,
with its bewildering complexities. No, it fell to the trained, the
specialist in knowledge, the man who could do something more
efficiently, with greater precision than his fellows.

He could not do that--not yet.