Chapter VII: Part 7

Moron River offered a chance for the most eventful and picturesque drive of logging history. From its source above the Border to its mouth on the Oregon coast it was like a huge child of a river, for it flowed ridiculously in every mile of its course. Here it ran smoothly for a short distance, then it would flow jerkily, making spasmodic waves; again, its surface would form into vast eddies that whirled like merry-go-rounds, and from these the waters rushed in heaving rolls of foam; there were quicksands where the river played hide and seek, nearly disappearing in places, miles where it turned and ran back and then curved into its course again, making a perfect figure eight. Moron River flowed everywhere in zigzags and curlicues, cutting all manner of capers and didos. Any man but Paul Bunyan would have admitted the impossibility of making a drive on it. But he only smiled when he saw it and said: “If my rivermen will forget poetry they can drive it easily.”

The timber in this high, wide valley reached from the Eastern slopes of the Cascade Hills to the Western slopes of the Rockies. These sage trees resembled the desert sagebrush of to-day. They were not large; few of them were over two hundred feet in height, and not one of them could give a butt log over nine feet in diameter. But they all had many massive limbs which were crowded with silver gray leaves, each leaf being the size of a No. 12 shoe. The brown bark of the sage trees was thick, loose and stringy; it would have to be peeled from the logs before they were snaked to the landings by the blue ox.

“Splendid work for the swampers and limbers,” said Paul Bunyan, as he cruised the timber. “What a noble logging land is the He Man country! Surely my loggers will be re-born here into even better men than they were before they fell into an illness of poetry and ideas!”

The first day of logging in the He Man country seemed to justify the great logger’s best hopes. The men came out from breakfast with a swinging, swaggering tramp, loudly smacking their lips over the lingering flavors of buffalo milk hot cakes. This potent food made them vigorously he in every action. Each man chewed at least three cans of Copenhagen and a quarter-pound of fire cut during his first twelve hours in the woods. “P-tt-tooey! P-tt-tooey! P-tt-tooey!” sounded everywhere among shouted oaths and coarse bellowing. Every ax stroke buried the bit deeply in the tough sage wood, and brown dust spurted and gushed constantly from every singing saw. Crash! Crash! Crash! The thunder of falling trees sounded like a heavy cannonade. On all the loggers’ backs gray sweat stains spread from under their suspenders, and their hair hung in dripping strings over their red, wet faces. They had got up steam for the first time since leaving the Hickory Hill country, and they were rejoicing in it. Even after the eleventh hour had passed their eyes were bright, though red-rimmed from stinging sweat, though wrinkles of weariness had formed around them. The men were tired indeed; the fallers and swampers were now panting through open mouths, and they were chewing nervously on their tongues, as is the habit of men when they are wearied out; but they never missed a lick, and when Paul Bunyan called them home they could still walk springily.

When they were back in camp they did not even complain of the smeared, sticky feeling which always follows great sweats. No one spoke delicately of bathing; the loggers all washed and combed carelessly; and soon they made a trampling, growling host around the cookhouse door.

The rafters and beams of the great cookhouse shook at this supper, so savagely did the loggers tackle the platters of bear meat. Even the bones were crushed, ground, and devoured; and Hot Biscuit Slim and his helpers were delighted when all the dishes were left slick and clean.

That night no poems were recited in the bunkhouses, but the loggers roared out “The Jam on Garry’s Rock” and other plain old songs. The loggers all crawled into their blankets at an early hour, and every one of them emitted gruff snores as soon as he went to sleep.

Paul Bunyan listened to them, and he praised the saints for the He Man country. Had it not been for this region there was no telling what continuous plagues of poetry would have afflicted his simple men. Now they were back to normalcy.

The loggers continued to improve as summer passed and the short autumn of the He Man country ran its course. The first snow of the cold season fell on a redeemed camp. That snow flew in on a thundering wind; its flakes quickly made masses of dry snow around the bunkhouse doors; and these were swept into huge drifts that were window-high in places when the breakfast gong rang. The loggers roared and cheered when they rushed out for their buffalo milk hot cakes. Paul Bunyan listened to their basso growls of hunger, their rumbling jovial cursing, their bellows of laughter, and he chuckled so heartily that the snow which had gathered on his beard was shaken over a crowd of loggers, burying them. They dug themselves out, whooping their appreciation of the humorous happening, and they jestfully shook their fists at their chuckling leader. Then, without stopping to dig the snow from their shirt collars, they galloped on for the steaming cookhouse.

The stamping and banging, the clatter and crash, the smoking, sucking and grinding of meal time had never sounded with more vigor and power than on this wild winter morning. Breakfast done, the loggers came forth wiping their mouths with flourishing swipes of their fists, and with much snorting thumb-blowing of noses. When they were back in the bunkhouses, they laced up their boots, arguing loudly the while as to whether true savages, real tough bullies, would wear mackinaws when it was only forty below zero.

“Mackinaws?” yelled the majority. “Where’s your red bully blood, you Hunyoks? Mackinaws! Hell, no, burlies; we won’t even button the collars of our shirts!”

And then Ford Fordsen, camp tinker, bunkhouse handyman, and prophet, got an idea which swiftly ran through all the bunkhouses.

“Real rough, red-blooded, burly, bully, savage, dirt-stomping, ear-chewing, tobacco-loving, whisker-growing, hell-roaring He Men are not going to wear their boots and pants like we’ve been doing,” said he. “Look you now: here’s a ten-inch boot top, here are two inches of wool sock above it; and there’s a pants’ leg all tucked down nice and pretty inside of it. Mates, it looks too delicate. It is no way for a fire-eating logger to wear his duds. Here now; watch me and do as I do, and be a real band of honest-to-God bullies. This way--look!”

He jerked open his horn-handled old knife, and he slashed off the legs of his tin breeches, his mackinaw pants and his overalls, just below his knees. He bit off a jaw-full of fire cut and then stood up, his fists on his hips, an unshaven cheek bulging with pepper-flavored tobacco, shapeless hat down over one eye, collar unbuttoned, suspenders stretching over his expanded chest, and--high mark of all high marks, distinction of distinctions--his pants ending in ragged edges below his knees. An inch of red drawers’ legs showed below them, there followed bands of green wool socks, then black boot tops. Stagged pants! The finishing touch! Poetry was crushed to earth, never to rise triumphantly again in Paul Bunyan’s camp. The inventive and prophetic Ford Fordsen had about killed it.

The great leader was delighted beyond words when he saw the loggers in their new costumes. He smiled indulgently when he heard some of the more modest among them saying that the brush would not bother them greatly now, and that Ford Fordsen’s invention was a mighty good useful one. This is the reason loggers of to-day give for stagging their pants. But Paul Bunyan knew that his men had all taken up with the invention because it suited their natures, which had come back to them. Most of them indeed, admitted it. The loggers of our time should also be frank and admit that stagged pants spring from the he-bulliness of their souls. As Paul Bunyan said, “Etiquette, dainty speech, sweet scents, poetry and delicate clothes belong properly in the drawing-room, the study and the sanctum. They are hothouse growths. Loggers should take pride in hard labor and rough living. Anything that helps their Hesomeness makes them better men. All glory to you, Ford Fordsen, for the invention of stagged pants.”

He offered the bunkhouse genius his little finger. Ford Fordsen got his arms a fourth of the way around it, and the two inventors shook hands.

The months went on and the loggers’ rugged virtues continued to gain strength from the virile buffalo milk hot cakes. They did noble work among the sage trees and felled so many of them that the Big Swede and the blue ox had to go in a gallop during their working hours to snake all the logs to the landings.

Now, this was the year which is mentioned in history as the Year of the Hard Winter. But the bitterest cold could not now chill the blood of Paul Bunyan’s He-Men. They had never been so jolly as they were this Christmas, and they jigged and chortled when Paul Bunyan gave each of them a knife devised especially for pants-stagging. The great leader had cut out thousands of these excellent presents from two of Babe’s old ox shoes. This was the merriest holiday season the camp had ever known, and even the incredible cold of New Year’s Day did not lessen the noisy bunkhouse gayety.

On the last night of the old year the mercury in the great thermometer which hung on the camp office had dropped to four hundred degrees below zero. Then the tube burst, and no one could tell the temperature, but it got appreciably colder. The next morning the boiling coffee froze on the stove, despite the desperate stoking of the kitchen firemen, and the loggers had to drink hot brown ice for their morning’s breakfast. But they tramped cheerfully to work, nevertheless, cracking their mittened hands together and stamping the ground as they went along. They worked so hard to keep warm on this day that they talked and swore but little. This was fortunate. For on this incomparable New Year’s Day every spoken word froze solidly in the air as soon as it was uttered. The next day the temperature rose, but the words remained frozen, and many a logger bumped his mouth by walking into the HELLOS and DAMNS which were solid in the air. But the hardy victims only laughed through their split lips at such accidents. These words all thawed out at once on a warmer day; they melted in one long-drawn-out, mournful echoing shout so unhumanly humorous in sound that the loggers rolled with laughter to hear it.

Cold as the winter was, Paul Bunyan and his men were reluctant to see it go, for every day had brought some tickling incident. But at last the gray frost crystals began to glitter occasionally from rays of sunshine which filtered through the white winter mists. Then Paul Bunyan began to plan for the hazardous historical drive down Moron River. Spring was at hand, and the great logger remembered his old whimsical query:

“If Springtime comes can Drives be far behind?”

The loggers, too, sensed the approach of the driving season, and every night the bunkhouses rang with sounds of filing, as the rivermen sharpened calks, pike poles and peavies. They bellowed the old driving songs as never before, and the floors shook as they leaped and pranced to show the marvelous springiness of their legs. They got so comradely in their merriment and exuberance that the last poet among them ventured a poem which began:

“It’s all very well to be profane,
When life is as dark as night;
But the man worth a fuss is the man who can cuss
When everything ’round him is bright.”

He got no further, for in an instant one bully had him down, chewing savagely on his ear, while others raked his ribs with their calks. It was the last sigh of poetry in the camp. Paul Bunyan heard about it and had one of the happiest hours of his life as he rejoiced over the good news.

“But every silver cloud has its shadows,” he said sensibly, when his exaltation had passed. “I still expect great troubles and difficulties.” He was wise indeed in this thought, for he got a troublous problem at once.

Sure as the great logger had been that the powerful buffalo milk hot cakes could only do good for his loggers, sure as he was they could not give his men too much red blood or make them too hellishly He, Paul Bunyan had yet failed to reckon on the dire effects that the virile food might have on weaker men. He had given no thought to the scissor-bills who herded and milked the buffalos. Throughout the fall these men had shown nothing but their usual tameness and amiability; during the Hard Winter they had shivered silently by their camp fires; but now they began to show that the powerful food was having a terrific effect on them. Many of the buffalos had died during the cold spell, and the scissor-bills had made pants from the shaggy hides. Some of the high-behinds had frozen also, and the scissor-bills had taken their skins and made tall, flapping hats of them. Colds had afflicted them during the winter, and for convenience they had tied their handkerchiefs around their necks. They took a fancy to this fashion and let the handkerchiefs remain after their colds were gone. Their next outbreak of virility was to unravel one of Babe’s halter ropes and arrange a long little rope with a noose-end from each thread of it. They practiced throwing nooses over the posts of the buffalo corral fence until they became quite expert in casting them. The scissor-bills then caught wild horses with their ropes and broke them for riding. They got to be a crazy, noisy gang after this, and Paul Bunyan began to notice them as they rode through the sage trees, yipping shrilly. And then one morning they came to the hero-leader and requested that they be called “scissor-bills” no longer, but “buffalo boys” instead. Paul Bunyan admired their shaggy pants, their necker-chiefs and their tall hats, and he thoughtlessly consented to their wishes. He did not feel that the scissor-bills had it in them to become real He Men, but he was not a man to discourage worthy ambitions.

But Paul Bunyan soon had reason to remember one of his old sayings, that the road from the palace of generosity leads through a forest of perils. His one kindly gesture towards the lowly scissor-bills made them a powerful faction in the He Man country, and a fierce rivalry between them and the loggers soon developed. For they insisted on being called “buffalo boys,” and Paul Bunyan’s best men saw an intolerable dignity in the title. The buffalo boys painted large B. B’s. on their hats, they painted the letters on the buffalos and on their horses also. At calving time they devised some irons in the shape of double B’s., and they branded the buffalo calves with them. The buffalo boys grew even bolder; they began to ride among the bunkhouses in the evenings, yipping and yelling at the men who were earnestly preparing for the greatest drive of history.

Such impudence was not long tolerated, of course, and it got so that every morning found buffalo boys mourning for lost ears and doctoring the wounds made by sharp calks. But buffalo milk was running hot in their veins, and their new courage carried them to still greater extremes. One morning when the loggers came to work they found that every sage tree had B. B. burned into its bark. That day the drive was not talked about, for the loggers plotted vengeance as they toiled. This night they turned the buffalos out of the corral, and the buffalo boys were out until morning rounding up the herd. The following night they, in turn, galloped past the bunkhouses and roped every stovepipe that stuck above a roof. They dragged them into the timber and hid them, and the loggers had to dress by cold stoves the next morning. That evening, during milking time, the loggers slipped into the buffalo boys’ tents and poured water into their blankets; the next morning the loggers found their boots all filled with ice, for the buffalo boys had played such an evil trick on them during the night. The astonishing audacity of these lowly creatures was not to be longer endured.

Mark Beaucoup and his followers would not listen to the pleas of the moderates that the punishment of the buffalo boys be left until the drive was finished. The bunkhouse cranks had grown savage in the He Man country, and they now threw aside all restraint. They yelled their rage until all the loggers got excited; and in a short time the bunkhouses were empty, and the loggers were marching on the buffalo boys’ camp. They closed in silently and attacked with lion-like ferocity. The buffalo boys, their timidity vanished now, stood up and gave vigorous battle. When Paul Bunyan stepped into camp and called, “Roll out, my bullies! Roll out for the big drive!” he got no answer. Then he looked toward the buffalo corral and saw a sea of dust surging over miles of the valley. All over the gray surface of this sea fists were flashing up as whitecaps jump and fall on wind-blown waters. Paul Bunyan leaped towards the scene of conflict.

But the great logger’s endeavors to separate the fighters were vain. When he got among them he had to stand still for fear of trampling them; the buffalo boys and the loggers crowded against his feet as they clinched and punched, and some of them rolled under the arches of his boots. He ordered the factions to their camps, but they would not hear. Then Paul Bunyan bellowed. The battlers were all thrown down, but they bounced up fighting. Ears and fingers were now flying up everywhere in the dust, and the leader was alarmed by the thought that a more fearful condition was in sight than even poetry had threatened to bring about. The ferocious masculinity that his two gangs of men had got from the virile hot cakes would leave him with camps of earless and fingerless cripples. Disaster loomed over the logging industry once more.

His brain racing like a dynamo as it conceived desperate ideas, Paul Bunyan failed to notice at first that the dust sea had mysteriously vanished, though the struggle still raged. Not until he saw all the loggers and buffalo boys stop fighting and throw themselves on the ground, each man clutching at his own legs and howling with fear, did he realize that an unnatural happening was saving his men from exterminating each other. Every frantic fighter was howling, “My boots is runnin’ over with blood! I’m a goner sure!”

Paul Bunyan heard them with amazement, and with amazement he gazed on the valleys and hills. A thin mist was rising from the ground. It vanished soon; then Paul Bunyan saw that rain was springing from the earth, falling up--if the term may be used--for many feet, and then dropping back again. The first shower had rained up the legs of the buffalo boys and the loggers, and they had mistaken it for blood. Now they were still rolling, moaning and bellowing. Paul Bunyan’s amazement soon passed, for he was accustomed to unnatural seasons, climates and happenings. He was all delight that the unusual rain had stopped the battle, and he saw no harm in it yet; he did not know that this was a rain of such tremendous force that it had poured through the earth....

For this was the Spring That the Rain Came Up From China....

Harder and harder the rain came up, and it was not long before the loggers and the buffalo boys opened their eyes and stopped their yelling. They were soaked all over now, and they knew that the sudden warm wetness of their legs had not been from blood. Paul Bunyan laughed through his beard, which was high and dry, when he saw his men begin to run for the camp to get out of the strange rain. The fight was forgotten, and the logging industry was saved.

The ground hissed as the rain came up with new violence. The drops became streams ... the streams doubled ... trebled ... and in an hour there were ten streams where only one had come up before. The rain became a downpour--or an up-pour, rather. It got the proportions of a cloudburst--or, perhaps it should be said, an earthburst. The hillocks and hummocks had forests of small fountains. In the low places pools were forming, and these boiled with muddy foam as myriads of miniature geysers spurted up from them.

Paul Bunyan, feeling great satisfaction over the happy ending the rain had given to the conflict between his two tribes, did not at first realize the danger to his recent logging operations from the unnatural rain. When he did think of the logs piled along the river he ran swiftly to look after them. He was too late. Moron River had already risen far over its banks, and all of the brown, peeled sage logs, the fruit of a season’s labor, were now tossing on a muddy flood. The rain was coming up through the river in sheets; torrents were pouring into the stream from every small gully. The water was rising at the rate of a foot a minute. It would soon be in the camp grounds. Paul Bunyan made no attempt to retrieve his lost logs; he now rushed to save his camp.

The loggers had turned their bunkhouses upside down, because the rain had come up through the floors. They had then set their bunks on the rafters, and they were now snug and dry, for the rain could not pour up through the tight roofs. The loggers left their cozy quarters reluctantly when they heard Paul Bunyan call, “Roll out or roll Up!” They could imagine nothing more disagreeable than its raining up their pants’ legs, rough He Men though they were. But when they saw the river rising in rushing waves they did not need Paul Bunyan’s orders to make them run for the cookhouse. Johnny Inkslinger was wiring the camp office and Babe’s stable to the mammoth building, and the Big Swede was making his fastest moves since the Dakota days as he hitched up the blue ox. Paul Bunyan roared, “Yay, Babe!” just as the river waters thundered into camp. The blue ox plunged towards the Cascade Hills. He dragged the three greatest buildings of the camp and all the loggers to safety. But the bunkhouses were rolling over and over in the flood.

Paul Bunyan and his two aides saved two of the buffalo boys, two buffalos, two high-behinds, two tigermunks, two blond wolves, and two wild horses, from the raging waters, but all other life perished.

For forty days and forty nights it rained up from China, and then the flood receded. Paul Bunyan and his men looked down from the Cascades and saw that all of the old He Man country had been washed away. It was now a low valley. There was sage in it still, but this sage was only brush. Ridges and buttes of gray rock were all of the old land that remained. There was no longer any logging in the greater part of it. But here on the new slopes of the Cascades was a more cheering sight. For the old land over these slopes had covered a magnificent forest of white pine which was even finer than that around the old home camp. The loggers shouted when they saw it. And was it a tear, that gleam of moisture in Paul Bunyan’s beard? If so, it was from his new happiness.

“It’s an ill rain,” he chuckled, “that brings no logger wood.”

The two buffalo boys, like the loggers, still heroic from their virile winter’s diet, had come through their ordeal in good shape and the buffalos had slept all the forty days and nights. But the other poor animals! The wild horses were wild no longer; they had become tame and would now eat sugar out of any man’s hand. The buffalo boys nick-named them bronchos. The high-behinds, the blond wolves and the tigermunks were all cowards at heart, and they had been scared out of twenty years’ growth. Not one of them was knee-high to a logger now. The Big Swede made his first and only joke about the tigermunks, who had been scared into the size of chips.

“Tigermunks!” he grinned. “Aye tank these har ban chipmunks!”

And chipmunks they have been called ever since. Paul Bunyan’s history does not tell how the high-behinds came to be named jack rabbits, or how the blond wolves came to be named coyotes. No doubt they were also named humorously, for the loggers were gay when the rain no longer came up from China. Anyhow, the old names are no longer used in the He Man country.

EVIL INVENTIONS

Paul Bunyan knew nothing about women, but he had heard of them with little liking for the stories he heard. History, industry, invention and oratory were, to his mind, the four grand elements of human life. And women, as they were revealed in the loggers’ stories, cared little about these elements. Women seemed to lack inventiveness especially, and this was man’s greatest quality. Women, the great logger had heard, were often marvelous cooks; but men had invented both can-openers and doughnuts. Women were excellent makers of garments; but men had invented calked boots, mackinaws and stagged pants. Women were assiduous readers of poetry; but men had invented most of the poetry that these creatures cared about. Even in the writing of history, where inventiveness is not allowed (or _was_ not, rather; for nowadays, such is progress, many historians are good inventors also), women had apparently done nothing. Paul Bunyan, in the early days of his camp, often marveled when he heard his loggers hurrahing and stamping as they talked about the people called pretty women. He himself could not see their use in the grand parts of life. But when he knew his men better he decided that women were creations of the loggers’ fancies, that they were incredible and fabulous.

For Paul Bunyan’s loggers only cared to feel effects; they had no wish to think about causes. They would make a reality out of any fancy that delighted them; they never inquired beyond their pleasures. When they were told that they were making history they heard the statement with a thrill, but they did not pretend to know what it was all about. As for inventions, they used them joyfully, but they thought that Paul Bunyan’s new devices just happened. “We always sharpened our axes by rollin’ rocks down-hill,” the loggers would say. “We’d run alongside, holdin’ the ax blades on the stones as they rolled. But in the Big Dust country they was no rocks an’ no hills, so ol’ Paul made grindstones.” That was their story of the invention of the grindstone, an invention to which Paul Bunyan had given weeks of intense thought. And as for industry, why, a man just went out and did what old Paul told him to do. Oratory was great stuff; it made a man feel powerful good to listen to it; but, holy mackinaw! how was a man to remember all the things that old Paul said? But they did like oratory; yes, they liked it right well.

Now Paul Bunyan came to know that his men were great only in the performance of their work. They were not comprehenders and creators. They could hardly distinguish between knowledge and fancy. Thus the great logger came to doubt the existence of women. He came to consider all the loggers’ ideas as fancies and drolleries, little men’s nonsense. He seldom listened to them; and as time went on he forgot women along with the other notions with which the loggers amused themselves. In oration after oration Paul Bunyan emphasized the fact that logging was the greatest industry, and that loggers, therefore, were the greatest laborers; they should have no pride or thought outside the operations of Paul Bunyan. They believed this finally; and then their bunkhouse songs and stories were all about work in the woods and the river drives, and women were very seldom thought about. Johnny Inkslinger’s oratorical medicine swamped them with ideas one time; and later they were seduced into poetry; but they had become bully loggers again in the He Man country.

They would have kept the new innocency of their souls, no doubt, had the forty-day flood been a week shorter. During the first week of the flood the loggers were excited about the strange rain which was streaming up from China, then the muddy foaming waters which filled the valley below their place of refuge became a monotonous sight. Some of them began to tease the buffalo boys, and others played with the blond wolves, the high-behinds, the tigermunks and the other animals which Paul Bunyan had brought into the cookhouse. But these wild creatures had been so frightened by the flood that they would not learn tricks. Paul Bunyan invented picture cards for his men and the games of poker, rummy and cribbage; but the bunkhouse cranks were so violent at play that it had to be given up. Then the loggers could only tell stories, and sing and jig for amusement. During the last week of the flood, camp stories being told out, the loggers remembered women; and they became so interested in songs and stories about them that they were sorry when the flood was over and a spring day dawned on a new green land. This morning Paul Bunyan called, “Roll out or roll up!” but he got no answer. The surprised leader stopped and looked into the cookhouse. He saw Shanty Boy and three other bards standing with their arms over each other’s shoulders. The quartet was singing:

“Here I sit in jail, with my back to the wall;
And a red-headed woman was the cause of it all!”

“Red-headed woman?” Paul Bunyan stroked his beard in perplexity. “Woman? I think I have heard that word before. Woman ... m-m-m-hmm ... now I remember. Those creatures so strangely fascinating to plain men. I doubted their existence. At any rate, I hope we never meet with any. I have had difficulties enough from ideas, poetry and floods. My loggers shall now have hard work again and forget these tempting memories.”

Once more he roared the noble call to labor. The loggers heeded it this time, and they came out smiling blushingly. Thereupon Paul Bunyan made them a straightforward speech, beguiling phrased, however; and when it was done the loggers thought only of their work tools and of the handsome, odorous timber which covered the new slopes below them.

They got new tools from the camp office; and when the sunlight made golden trails among the pine trees the loggers were already wet with honest sweat, and many trees had dropped from their cutting. They worked without great exertion, for they were soft from their long rest, and Paul Bunyan had warned them against sore muscles and exhaustion. As the sun rose higher the spring air got warm and drowsy, and it breathed a troublous languor into their beings. The loggers went to extremes in heeding Paul Bunyan’s cautionary advice; and in the afternoon they toiled listlessly whenever they worked at all; but most of the time they leaned on their axes, or against trees, and expressed unusual wonderings. When the Big Swede remonstrated with them they replied that they felt weary and sore from their labor even now; old Paul would roar, they said, if they did not take care of their selves. They went on arguing loudly, neglecting their work, but the Big Swede had little time for argument. Babe, the blue ox, was now so exuberantly frisky in all his motions that the foreman had to watch him constantly. During this one short argument Babe had knocked down ten acres of trees with gay swings of his horns and had trampled them into splinters.

“Har noo!” yelled the Big Swede, hastily leaving the lazy loggers. And as Babe jerked him this way and that way, lashing the foreman with his lively tail and making playful pokes at him with his horns, the Big Swede grumbled, “By yeeminy! Aye tank dese crazy t’ings lak rain fall oop play hal with may yob!”

The Big Swede was easily discouraged, but Paul Bunyan had his usual hopefulness as he planned the reorganization of his camp. Johnny Inkslinger had left for the old home camp to discover how John Shears and the great farm had fared in the flood and to get Shagline Bill’s endless freight team started with loads of new supplies. The great logger himself had brought his workbench out of the camp office and set it up at the edge of the new pine forest. Then he planned a sawmill. It was not to be such a grand mill as he had erected on Round River in the Leaning Pine country; but he wanted a good one that would cut at least 10,000,000 feet of lumber in twelve hours. In six months he should have enough lumber to make a fair set of temporary bunkhouses for his men. In the meantime, it was good that the spring nights were so cheerful and warm, as the loggers could sleep in the open air without injury or even discomfort.

In a week the plans were finished, and, for a millhouse Paul Bunyan moved the back room of his camp office over to the banks of the Moron River, which had become a mature, decent, dependable stream since the flood; and he put a big crew of his loggers to work, making concrete beds for the saws and edgers and installing the mill machinery. Work dropped to nearly nothing in the woods. Paul Bunyan left the mill construction under the supervision of Ford Fordsen, camp tinker and the only bunkhouse inventor, and he went into the woods to make his men get out logs for the new mill.

Now Paul Bunyan was astonished and puzzled when he heard his loggers re-telling the stories with which they had amused themselves during the last week of the flood. Instead of working, one logger would lean against a tree and remark that he had always liked a little flesh on them himself; and his partner would reply that every man had his own taste, but as for him, give him the cute little kind that a burly could tuck under one arm. Then a swamper would come up and say that he didn’t care much about shape, but he did like red hair and a wide mouth. And a limber would join the group and say that he guessed he was peculiar, but he didn’t have much use for the frolicksome ones, but he liked them quiet and sort of dreamy-eyed. Each man would argue at length for his own inclinations, carefully respecting, however, the preferences of the others.

Paul Bunyan lost patience upon hearing such nonsense; and he gave sharp orders that there was to be no more talking in the woods. Logs were needed for the new mill; his men were to get down to business and forget their vain imaginings; for it was doubtful if such fantastic creatures as they talked about really existed.

For the first time in camp history Paul Bunyan’s loggers felt that their leader was driving them, and they worked sullenly. Their aroused memories troubled them greatly as the spring got more of languorous warmth, and it was torment for them to keep their thoughts to themselves as they worked. But at night they were free to speak; and as they lay in their blankets among the trees they talked for hours in soft voices, gazing dreamily at the moon and stars, and sighingly breathing the warm, odorous air of the spring night. And in their sleep, memories gave them perilous dreams; and they rolled and tossed and pulled covers and talked tenderly between snores.

But these memories--if they were _not_ fancies--were not so hurtful as poetry and ideas, for they allowed the loggers to work, once Paul Bunyan had stopped conversation about them. When the new mill was completed, the mill pond was black with logs. Paul Bunyan came in from the woods, and Ford Fordsen showed him his finished work with pride. The boilers were loaded with steam, said the bunkhouse genius; the rollers were in their oiled boxes, the chains were over the sprockets, and the belts were tight around the pulleys; and the great shining bandsaw was waiting with sharp teeth for its first bite from a pine log.

Paul Bunyan heard his fellow inventor with admiration, for there was no room for envy in the great logger’s soul. He had an honest comradely smile for Ford Fordsen as he lifted his hand and gave the signal for the sawing to begin. Now the exhausts roared, the main shaft began to revolve, the chains rattled and squeaked, and the rolls and pulleys whirled. But the great bandsaw did not move. Ford Fordsen ran into the mill to discover the trouble; he returned at once, frowning a little, but not disconcerted.

“A slight mistake, Mr. Bunyan,” he said crisply.

“Yes? Explain this slight mistake, Ford Fordsen.”

“It is only a _slight_ mistake. But we will have to rebuild the mill.”

“Well; I am happy to hear that it is only a _slight_ mistake,” said Paul Bunyan. “You can rebuild the mill at once, I suppose.”

“In six months perhaps. I prefer to make my own plans and invent some new machines that match my own ideas. I am rather glad of this _slight_ mistake.”

“Impudence!” roared Paul Bunyan. “Tell me at once what is wrong.”

Ford Fordsen was thrown from his feet, but he got up with dignity.

“You have the advantage of me in size,” he said pounding wrathfully with his fist on the great logger’s toe. “But I, too, am an inventor now, and I claim equal rights with you in invention. You may have history, for history is bunk; you may have oratory, for your voice is larger than mine; and you may have industry, for you possess the blue ox. But as for invention----”

“Before you become an orator in spite of yourself tell me, as inventor to inventor, if you like, about this slight mistake,” said Paul Bunyan calmly.

“But I have told you that the mill must be rebuilt!” said Ford Fordsen impatiently. “However, if you must know, the slight mistake is this: The men who put in the concrete base for the headrig got to talking about women, and their minds left their job. They ran concrete around the saw, and now the lower part of this hundred foot band is frozen as in solid rock. The mill, you see, must be rebuilt; and I must be about it.”

“Women again!” grumbled Paul Bunyan. “If they do not exist my men soon will have invented them. If they do exist in other lands it is easy to see why there is no great industry, no marvelous inventions and no making of history in any place but my camp. Even as memories or fancies they are nuisances. But here: I must attend to this cocky little fellow.”

He reached down and seized Ford Fordsen between his thumb and forefinger and then raised him to a level with his eyes.

“Your grand and exceptional notions trouble my poor head,” said Paul Bunyan, “so I must work with my own simple ideas. You shall be at work with your felling ax once more this afternoon.”

“I warn you that I’ll not do foul, sweaty labor again, Mr. Bunyan,” said Ford Fordsen composedly. “If you put me back in the woods I’ll preach the ten-hour day to the loggers. And I ask you to return me to the ground. I find this high altitude uncomfortable.”

“Audacity!” exclaimed Paul Bunyan, so astonished that he nearly dropped this astonishing bunkhouse genius. “The ten-hour day! Thunderation! What an unheard of thing! Is the sun shining? Do I wear whiskers? Do men chew with their teeth? Is Babe a blue ox? And--do loggers work twelve hours a day? What devils do trail me! Ideas; poetry; floods; women; the ten-hour day--what next? By the holy old, roaring old, oily old----”

What would certainly have been the grandest curse of history was interrupted by the appearance of Johnny Inkslinger on the summits of the Cascades. Paul Bunyan’s wrath and chagrin vanished and the light shone once more into his eyes as his interested gaze followed the timekeeper’s progress. Shagline Bill’s endless freight team circled down the mountains behind Johnny Inkslinger. Paul Bunyan dropped Ford Fordsen carelessly into his pocket and stepped up the slopes to hear the news.

Johnny Inkslinger had a condensed report of fifteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one pages which dealt with the destruction of the great farm and the transformation of the Smiling River country in the unnatural rain. But he gave a more cheerful account of a new country which he had discovered. It was just over the mountains, he said, in the region called Nowaday Valley. There he had procured a good load of camp supplies. There were people in that country, the timekeeper went on to say, people of a very strange sort. He described them, and he ended his description by doubting if even one out of a hundred of these people could become a logger. Some were too ponderous, others were marvelously fragile, and everyone held an ax awkwardly.

“I have heard of such creatures,” said Paul Bunyan. “They are real, then. But not another word must be spoken about them. If my loggers were to hear that some of this species which they remember so ardently were at hand, I’d have more trouble than poetry gave me. We must keep this a secret, Johnny Inkslinger.”

Then they rose and walked over to the cookhouse, where the kitchen crew was unloading the freight wagons. Paul Bunyan had forgotten Ford Fordsen. But the impertinent bunkhouse genius had escaped from the pocket during the conversation. He now journeyed towards the woods, where the loggers were doing little but talk over their memories. And it is not difficult to imagine how much work was done after the enraged inventor arrived with his news of Johnny Inkslinger’s discovery.

Paul Bunyan, with energy that was unusual even for him, at once began to put the mill in a condition to operate. It was a good mill as it stood, outside of the solid saw, and he did not intend to rebuild it. That would take time, and he wanted to have new bunkhouses and the old camp routine as soon as possible. In order to keep his men from thinking about their troublesome memories it was necessary to have most of them in the woods again and to be with them himself. Then the bunkhouse bards would start the camp stories and songs once more, and the loggers would be protected at night also. So, to work.

Experienced as he was with inventing, Paul Bunyan was not long in getting an idea which solved his problem. First, he had the loggers who were detailed on mill construction build blocks of concrete under the floor beams of the millhouse. While they were completing this labor he got one of his old inventions and made many new models of it. This invention was the steam-drive potato masher, which he had devised for Hot Biscuit Slim, after the chief cook had originated mashed potatoes. In this invention Paul Bunyan had made the first known use of the steam cylinder. He now took a battery of steam-drive potato mashers and installed them on the new concrete blocks under the mill. Steam pipes were connected between them; and the new mill system was ready for a trial.

Paul Bunyan wiped the sweat from his dripping eyebrows and wrung out his beard; then he gave the signal to turn on steam. The potato mashers pumped up and down perfectly at the rate of five hundred strokes a minute. Each stroke thrust the mill building up forty feet and down forty feet. The big carriage moved forward, carrying a pine log; the solid saw met its bark and grain; then the log carriage, flashing up and down with the millhouse, moved swiftly ahead, and the first cant dropped on the rolls. The new mill was a success! Paul Bunyan’s inventive mind had triumphed again! True, the mill men got a little seasick from going forty feet up and forty feet down five hundred times a minute; but they soon got accustomed to this and declared that they preferred the bouncing saw mill to the ordinary quiet kind.

Now Paul Bunyan remembered Ford Fordsen.

“You would rebuild a mill because of a slight mistake,” he chuckled, reaching into his pocket for the bunkhouse genius. “Come now; I will show you how really simple it was to solve the problem of the solid saw.”

But Ford Fordsen was not in Paul Bunyan’s pocket, of course. He had not been there for a long time. Paul Bunyan quickly guessed that the bunkhouse genius had escaped while his leader was seated. The great logger’s last sitting had happened just one month ago, when he heard his returning timekeeper’s report. Certainly Ford Fordsen had gone to the woods with news of Johnny Inkslinger’s discovery.

Knowing the difficulties which the Big Swede had been having with the blue ox, knowing also the foreman’s lack of oratorical powers, Paul Bunyan feared greatly for his loggers. He ran at once for the timber where they were supposed to be working. The loggers were gone, and their felling tools also. And neither the Big Swede nor the blue ox was anywhere in the woods. The boughs of the last felled trees were already dead and dry and the stumps of these trees were browned by the suns of many days. The woods were still but for the wind whispers, and the breathing silence of the deserted timberland was mournful to the great logger. His was a somber, frowning countenance as he returned to camp. He looked in Babe’s empty stable before he passed, and two dark objects in the manger attracted him curiously. They were strange engines, and not of his devising. He had not seen their like before. He could lift one in his two hands; and he did so, turning it around and around, observing its upright boiler, its drums and cables, and the hewn logs to which it was bolted. Wondering how the engines had come to the manger, Paul Bunyan put them in his two mackinaw pockets and tramped on over the mountain towards Nowaday Valley, knowing that there he would find his loggers.

It was late afternoon when the leader-hero reached the Big Fir timber which covered the slopes around Nowaday Valley. Through the trees he saw a blue that was bluer than the sky. Babe mooed gently as his master approached, but his gaze remained fixed on the border where the green valley floor met the timber. Smoke was rising there; and now Paul Bunyan saw roofs and people among the firs.

“My loggers and the women folks,” said Paul Bunyan, not very cheerfully.

He strode on through the forest, and ere long he saw that smoke was coming from such an engine as he had in his pockets. Ford Fordsen was at the levers; now he jerked one, and a drum revolved swiftly, winding a cable which whipped and slashed underbrush as it was hauled from the timber. Then a big log to which the cable was fastened crashed through the small trees, plowing a deep furrow as it was dragged on. Now Ford Fordsen jerked another lever, the big log was lifted, and then it was lowered easily to a car which was standing on two shining steel rails....

A whistle shrilled. Paul Bunyan saw his loggers coming in droves from the woods. Ford Fordsen left his engine and approached the great logger.

“So the inventor has become the industrialist also,” said Paul Bunyan grimly. “I suppose you will now compete with me in oratory----”

“That is my affair.” Ford Fordsen interrupted his old leader coolly. “My only business with you, Mr. Bunyan, is to inform you that you must keep your ox away from my donkeys.”

“Donkeys?”

“I have named my skidding machines donkey engines. Your ox, your skidding machine, made cunning and conscienceless from jealousy, has escaped from your foreman; he waits until night; then he plunges out of the woods, seizes my engine in his teeth and makes away with it. He has stolen two of them. I demand their return.”

Paul Bunyan drew them from his pocket and dropped them to the ground.

“I do not care about your donkeys, your engines, your skidding machines,” said the great logger. “I have come for my men.”

“Try and get them,” said Ford Fordsen amiably.

“You may have learned inventing and industry,” said Paul Bunyan. “And you despise history. But I shall now teach you the worth of oratory.”

“I grant you the privilege of attempting it,” said Ford Fordsen pleasantly. “Instead of giving the loggers oratory I have given them the ten-hour day. And they have found other things.”

Paul Bunyan would not argue the merits of the ten-hour day with Ford Fordsen. Regretting that he had ever encouraged this man by praising his one noble invention, stagged pants, the great logger said no more, but went on into Nowaday Valley. He stopped at a place where there were many cottages. They were evidently used for bunkhouses by his loggers, as the men had come this way after leaving the woods. They were curious bunkhouses indeed, for the walls of each one were painted in bright colors; there were curtains in the windows, and every bunkhouse had a neat and pretty yard of grass and flowers. Paul Bunyan thought it strange that his bully loggers should tolerate this; but he did not allow the thought to trouble him. He began to speak with his rarest eloquence.

If he had delivered such an oration in the old home camp his men would have listened to him for days without thinking of eating or sleep. They would have been moved continuously by whatever emotions the sounds of the orator’s rich phrases evoked; and at the end they would have obeyed his most extravagant wish.

But now the loggers did not even come out of their bright bunkhouses to hear him. Now and again a face appeared at a window or in a doorway, but it was always the face of one of the women folk, seeming hostile or curious, but otherwise unmoved. Knowing that his oratorical powers had never been greater, Paul Bunyan was at last affected by a fear that the loggers were now ruled by a force stronger than his own. He put even more vigor and color into his oration, but he now spoke with less confidence....

Then one of the women folk came out of the bunkhouse. She stopped and looked up at the great logger with brave curiosity; and he in turn was so perplexed by the strange sight of this creature, who had something of the appearance of a logger, but was yet so unlike one, that he studied her and abandoned his oration. Was it possible that such frail and useless-seeming creatures could have powers surpassing his own?

Then Paul Bunyan did what every true man, whether ditch-digger or king, has often longed painfully to do. He now did that which men are forever attempting in their imaginings. He lifted the woman person in his hand and observed her as a naturalist observes a small kitten or a mouse.

This specimen of the women folk did not seem to mind the liberty which Paul Bunyan took with her. She sat comfortably in his hand, with her ankles crossed, and opened a case which hung from her arm; she gazed unconcernedly into a mirror which was in the lid of this case; then she patted powder on her nose and cheeks, turning her head first this way and then that way.