Part 12

Paul Bunyan kicked a hole in the seaward side of the corral, and the waters of the Pacific roared into the basin. When it was filled he began his famous imitation of the bawl of a lonely whale, and so perfect was his mimicry that in less than an hour an approaching school of the leviathans was sighted. They swam hesitatingly about the opening to the corral for a time, but as Paul Bunyan continued to call ever more cunningly and appealingly, they at last entered the trap. The Big Swede then got his stool and milk bucket, while Paul Bunyan scooped dirt into the corral gate. Johnny Inkslinger was called from the office, and all was ready for the first milking of a creature of the seas.

The Big Swede, who had been raised on a dairy farm in the old country, selected a cow whale that looked like a good milker, and Paul Bunyan, using all his wiles of manner and tricks of voice, soon had her playing about his hands. At last she was gentle and quiet, and, while Johnny Inkslinger held up her tail, the Big Swede came into the water with his bucket and stool and began milking with all the energy and skill that had won him the name of Sweden’s greatest milker in his youth. With the vigorous pressure of his hands, the whale’s milk was soon gushing into his bucket with such force that a dozen fire engines could not have equaled the flow. The gentled whale made no resistance, and the pail was soon filled with healthful, creamy milk. But just as the Big Swede was about to rise from his stool the whale’s calf, who had been swimming angrily about, suddenly charged the great milker and upset him. His head lodged in the milk bucket; he was bent double; and before he could recover himself, the little whale had butted the breath out of him and had spanked him blisteringly with his corrugated tail. This incident frightened the mother whale, and she escaped from Paul Bunyan’s hands; the Big Swede floundered about and yelled from the depths of the milk bucket; and the whole school of whales plunged about the corral in a wild panic. Worst of all, the first milking was spilled.

And indeed they were the whole day securing one bucket of milk. Not until Paul Bunyan thought of letting a whale calf suck his finger while the Big Swede was milking its mother were the sea-going dairymen able to get away from the corral with one milking. But at last the great milker limped to the shore with a foaming pail. He was breathing in wheezes, his clothes were in tatters, and the back of him, from head to heels, was marked from the tail blows of the little whales. He was the sorriest of sorry sights, but he had a feeble smile, nevertheless, in return for Paul Bunyan’s praise.

Babe took his first dose of whale’s milk resignedly and then closed his eyes again in weariness and sighed with pain. Paul Bunyan’s emotions smothered his caution; he ventured to express his doubts about the cure. Johnny Inkslinger immediately ran to the office, brought out his great soap box and mounted it.

“It is a nature cure!” he cried in ringing tones. “It cures slowly because nature cures slowly, but it cures surely and divinely! It is a great cure because it is a great idea, a marvelous idea, a heaven-sent idea, an original idea, my own idea, and it is the idea that will save us all!”

Paul Bunyan looked for a moment into the glowing eyes of his timekeeper and sighed. He did not reply.

For a week the three milked the whales twice daily and dosed the blue ox, while the loggers slept away their weariness. Babe took the whale’s milk meekly, but at each successive dose he swallowed more sluggishly, and after the fourth day he would not open his eyes while he drank. On the day the loggers came from the bunkhouses he refused to drink at all. Only an occasional twitching of his eyelids showed that life yet remained with him.

“He is dying,” said Paul Bunyan.

Johnny Inkslinger mounted the great box which had held the ninety-five tons of soap and began to speak.

“Fellow loggers and Paul Bunyan,” he began. “This miraculous idea, this saving and transfiguring idea----”

“Silence!” commanded the good and mighty logger.

So compelling was the power of that grave and august voice that the loggers hardly breathed as it sounded, and the wind subsided until it made only the faintest whisper among the trees. Then Paul Bunyan made one of his great orations. He did not require a soap box, he made no fantastic gestures, and he spoke simply and smoothly. He reviewed his enterprises and the deeds of his loggers; he dwelt especially on the achievements and faithfulness of Babe, the blue ox. His plain sincerity held the loggers spellbound; for sixty-nine hours the speech went on, and they did not so much as move an eyelash. In conclusion, Paul Bunyan told them that Babe would surely die, and as logging could not be done without him, their last labor together would be to dig his grave. He did not blame Johnny Inkslinger, he said; the best of men may be led astray by their imaginings and fall into evil ways. He had been a great doctor once, and he was a noble scribe still. Then Paul Bunyan solemnly and warningly spoke of the shadowy workings of fate, and in somber utterance he portrayed the pathos of yearnings, the frailty of blessings and the ultimate vanity of all endeavor. In the last three hours of his oration his voice sounded as a tolling bell. Mournfully, mournfully, the moments marched on, and a darkness came over the hills and the sea. From the eyes of each motionless logger the tears streamed unchecked; they formed in puddles around each man’s feet until all of them stood knee-deep in mud. When the oration was finished and they had extricated themselves and cleaned their boots, they made ready, and they left with Paul Bunyan for the North, where he had decided to dig Babe’s grave. The Big Swede stayed with the dying ox, and Johnny Inkslinger hid himself in the shadows of his office.

For a long time he remained there in an agony of thought. Remorse tormented him, though Paul Bunyan had not judged him guilty. But he suffered most from the humiliation of failure. It was his first, but--the thought came like a blinding flash of light--had he failed--yet? His reservoir of ideas was inexhaustible; as long as breath remained in the blue ox he could try other ideas on him. Think now! It had become as easy for him to summon grand ideas as for a magician to conjure rabbits from a hat, and almost instantly he had one, a superb notion, a glorious thought!

Johnny Inkslinger rushed from the office and roused the Big Swede, who was sitting in apathetic sadness by the blue ox.

“Listen now!” commanded the timekeeper. “You are to sit here and repeat continuously in a soothing voice, ‘You are well. You are well. You are well.’ Do you understand? Well then--no questions now--do as I have told you and Babe’s life will be saved. Do not fail, for all depends on your faithfulness! When I have returned with Mr. Bunyan I will finish the cure myself.”

The timekeeper, exulting in the certainty that his method would positively restore health to the blue ox, then started out on the trail of Paul Bunyan and the loggers. They should quit their melancholy task and return to find Babe on the road to recovery. He would complete the cure, and logging should go on as before.

The Big Swede at once began to repeat the words, “You ban well,” according to orders. For thirty-one hours they came from his tongue without interruption. Then his mouth got dry and hoarseness invaded his throat. The phrase was uttered with an effort. Then he had to resort to whispering in Babe’s ear. And finally even his whisper failed him.

The Big Swede had once nearly choked to death after making a high dive into muddy earth, and he had only been saved by copious doses of alcohol. The new oratorical cures were not understandable to him, but he remembered the potency of alcohol in clearing out the throat, so he got up and ran to the camp office, where he found the great carboys of the medicine once highly prized by Johnny Inkslinger. Taking three of them under his arm, the Big Swede returned to the blue ox. He took a huge drink from one of them, and he was again able to go on with the treatment. For a few hours it was only necessary for him to drink once every thirty minutes to drive away the hoarseness, but it resisted stubbornly, and the periods between the drinks grew shorter and shorter. By the time the Big Swede had opened the last carboy of alcohol his brain was addled by the fumes of the liquor, and his heart was softened by its influence until it beat only with sympathy for the blue ox. He forgot what he was to say, and instead of repeating, “You ban well,” he began to sigh, over and over, “Poor ol’ sick feller. Poor ol’ sick feller.” Fortunately this horrid perversion of Johnny Inkslinger’s idea did not last. The Big Swede’s vocal cords finally gave out, the alcohol smothered his will and closed his eyes. He could not resist the fogginess that crept over his brain, and at last he fell over and began to snore.

Babe had lain motionless and silent while the Big Swede was treating him, but when the foreman fell he had knocked over the last carboy of alcohol, and the liquor poured over the nostrils of the blue ox and trickled into his mouth. He groaned, he stirred, his legs quivered. Then he sat up, looking eagerly about for more. He soon spied, through the open door of the office, the glitter of the other containers of liquor. Slowly, painfully, he staggered to his feet. His tongue lolling feverishly, he stumbled towards the office. A desperate swing of his horns crashed in the side of the building, a flirt of his hoofs knocked the tops from the remaining carboys, and in nineteen minutes he had emptied them all. A vat of Epsom salts was cleaned up in seven gulps, barrels of pills and capsules, and cartons of powders were quickly devoured; in half an hour there was nothing left of the old time medicines of Johnny Inkslinger but splinters and broken glass.

Then the alcohol began to surge through the veins of the blue ox. The frisky, exuberant spirit of his healthy days returned. He pranced and sashayed. He lifted his tail and bellowed. His breath came in snorts as he lightly pawed the ground. For a time he was content with such merry gamboling, frolicking and romping about, then he felt a sentimental longing for Paul Bunyan and his mates of the woods, and he started out to find them. But the alcohol mounted to his head, it dimmed his eyes, and he lost the trail. He wandered into the Wet Desert country and was caught in a terrific rainstorm. He toiled stubbornly on, though his befuddled senses had lost all sense of direction and he sank knee-deep into the desert mud at every step. As he struggled ahead, weaving first to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, water rolled from his back and foamed in cataracts down his dragging tail. A river coursed down the crooked path he left behind him. He grew weak again after he had plowed through the mud for hours and the fever had left his blood. When the storm passed his strength left him and he sought rest on a high plateau.

There Paul Bunyan and the loggers found him, after a three weeks’ search which had begun when the Big Swede brought the news of his disappearance. At first the loggers were sure he was dead, and groans of sorrow rose in dismal thunders from the vast host. But Johnny Inkslinger would not give up hope. He had repelled the lure of grand ideas at last, and he had his old medicine case with him now. In a moment he had emptied its store of alcohol and Epsom salts down Babe’s throat. In a few minutes the blue ox opened his eyes. The loggers frantically cheered. Babe answered them with a bellow that threw even the loggers on the farthest hills to the ground. Though the blue ox was thin and feeble still, the vitality of health was in his voice again. “He is cured!” said Paul Bunyan.

“He is cured!” shouted the loggers, as they scrambled to their feet.

“Yah,” said the Big Swede blissfully.

Johnny Inkslinger alone said nothing. He, too, was cured.

Say the old loggers:

Ever since he took his drunken course through the Wet Desert a stream has flowed down the crooked trail made by the blue ox. It is called Snake River in all the geographies. The great whale corral is known as Coos Bay. And Babe’s unfinished grave has become the islands and waters of Pugent Sound. The Cascade Mountains of Washington were made from the dirt thrown up by the loggers and Paul Bunyan when they began to dig the grave, and a bitter dispute still rages regarding the name for the loftiest peak. The loggers and the people of Seattle call it Mt. Bunyan, the people of Tacoma and the Indians call it Mt. Tacoma, and the geographers and tourists have named it Mt. Rainier, after the weather, which is rainier there than in any other part of the country.

So say the old loggers.

And loggers are truthful men.

NEW IOWA

Paul Bunyan, a historian first, an industrialist second, an inventor third, an orator fourth, was perhaps an artist in the fifth degree of his importance. Most authorities among the loggers of to-day insist that he was a great man of only four parts; they declare there was no art in him. The authorities of the classroom, less reverent and generous in their judgments, refuse to consider him as more than an industrialist; but the professors must be doubted a little, because they are certainly jealous of the great logger’s simple eloquence and his popularity with the plain people.

In the camps I have heard college loggers quote a teacher whom they called Professor Sherm Shermson as follows: “Fellows, there is no use talking. Paul Bunyan was a conscientious logger, I guess. Maybe he wrote _big_ histories but, fellows, he didn’t write _great_ histories. And his inventions were only useful in his logging operations; not one of them has become a universal boon to humanity. I expect he could make a right good speech; but, mark this point now, there is a _difference_ between a right good speech and eloquence. Eloquence, fellows, must have morals and ideals in it to _be_ eloquence. And as Paul Bunyan had French-Canadian blood, I must believe that his orations had more of Latin emotionalism in them than of Real American ideals and morals. I guess we’ll agree, fellows, that his Nordic foreman was a man of greater moral force and of purer mind.”

I do not know the rest of the professor’s argument, as the college loggers would listen to no doubts against the teachings of Professor Sherm Shermson. So I would always leave them when they went too far in their educated talk. Some might think that Professor Sherm Shermson was misquoted by his boys; but the first thing college loggers hear when they come to the woods is warnings about the dangers of telling falsehoods in the bunkhouses; so it is probable that the words which they attribute to Professor Sherm Shermson are typical of the teachings about Paul Bunyan in American universities.

But so long as trees are felled the race of loggers will hold to a staunch faith in Paul Bunyan as the supreme historian and maker of history, the most resourceful inventor, and the most powerful orator, as well as the most enterprising industrialist of all time. But they too question his art. He appreciated the folk songs and tales of his men, it is admitted, and he had his playhouses, wherein he painted and sculped about. His Paint Pots are still to be seen in the Yellowstone, and his wall painting in the Grand Canyon shows that he was clever with the brush. Most of his sculpture was left unfinished, but it is impressive, for all that. His beginnings for the busts of Johnny Inkslinger and the Big Swede, the unfinished works in the Yosemite which are called North Dome and Half Dome, plainly show that he was no crude chiseler. But, it is no wonder that loggers have little to say about their hero’s artistic creations, for these works had nothing to do with the logging industry, and he had no help from his men in making them. He only amused himself with art when he had no difficult labors to perform. Then, it is known that he opposed the teaching and practice of art among his loggers. He was particularly opposed to the writing of poetry by his men. He encouraged the making of simple songs and the telling of true tales by picked men, bunkhouse bards; but even these favored minstrels dared not attempt the making of grand, grave and lofty verse.

The earnest and reverent critic who studies Paul Bunyan will come to reason, however, that the master logger’s Camp Rule 31,721, which prohibited the writing of poetry, is no fair indication of his own feeling for noble rimes; it only proves that he thought his loggers no more fitted for the enjoyment of art than they were fitted for the understanding of history or the comprehension of scientific inventions. It is very probable that Paul Bunyan himself wrote tragic blank verse in his exuberant youth, and happy hunting songs in his elder years of discouragement. But he kept them to himself. He felt that all art was dangerous for his loggers; he knew that poetry was especially so. This he learned in his attempt to log off New Iowa. For there the loggers all turned poets and nearly ruined the logging industry.

Paul Bunyan’s decision to move to New Iowa developed from the thought that its healing climate would hasten the convalescence of Babe, the blue ox, and that its orange palms would give his men the tough logging which they sorely needed. Babe, having fallen sick, had been near to perishing from Johnny Inkslinger’s new-fangled cures; but he was saved when the camp doctor got sense and returned to his old-fashioned reliable remedies. The blue ox was now cured, but he was far too weak to begin hard labor at once. So his master was put to it to devise a plan that would let Babe regain his strength and yet give natural labor to the loggers.

Since leaving the Hickory Hill country, they had done little of the grand work for which they were born. They had lost a great deal of their innocent pride and self-respect in toiling with picks and shovels; and Johnny Inkslinger’s abandonment of scientific medical practice for medical oratory had shaken their faith in the integrity of his knowledge and the scope of his power. In the time when he had written his figures and made his cures without explaining and glorifying them the loggers had regarded him as a worker of mysteries and had been in great awe of him. But now that he had revealed his mind from a soap box the loggers only remembered his eloquent boasts and his failure to make good. Alcohol and Epsom salts seemed common to them now, and they laughed at the camp doctor for having had to go back to them.

Paul Bunyan heard them poking rough fun at Johnny Inkslinger’s folly on their first night in the Oregon camp, after the return was made from the Wet Desert country.

“In words there is a magic poison which is more powerful than the plain substance of them,” mused Paul Bunyan. “This magic whips emotions and stuns sense, and it overpowers any mind which is one part sense and nine parts emotion. And these loggers of mine ... these loggers of mine....”

Another clamor broke out in the bunkhouses, and Paul Bunyan, smiling sadly, listened to hear what nonsense his men were talking now. The bunkhouse cranks were the leaders in the new uproar, and when the master logger heard their words and the applause that followed, his eyebrows drew down in a frown which the moonlight could not penetrate, and his eyes had a hard glitter in the shadows.

For the bunkhouse cranks were saying that it looked like logging couldn’t last much longer now; the old blue ox was in a bad way and it was hard to think he’d ever be himself again in this here world; Johnny Inkslinger was getting so childish that he’d probably lose his figuring power, just as he had blundered in his doctoring; and old Paul himself--it looked like even he was losing his hold, as he had started to dig Babe’s grave before the blue ox was even near dead. Old Paul would never have given in that soon in the days on Onion River, said the bunkhouse cranks. Things would surely go from bad to worse, they agreed, and it was no use to look for the good old times to come back. The same talk was going on in all the bunkhouses and the bards had few cheerful arguments against it. The loggers were losing their old innocent, exuberant, devil-may-care spirit.

Paul Bunyan sat down on six of the high hills above the whale corral, pulled up a young fir tree and began to brush his beard and ponder. He had no doubts of his own powers and he felt that Johnny Inkslinger was as great as ever. The timekeeper’s recent obsessions and eccentricities were due to the lowness of spirit, the stagnation of soul, which comes sometime to all mental men. He was now recovered, and he would certainly do his part in the making of logging history as well as before, perhaps better. The trouble now was with the loggers. True men of muscle, the best virtues for them to possess were unquestioning loyalty and faithfulness to their leaders and simple confidence in them. Oratory was good for them when it stimulated these virtues, but ideas were poisonous; for they caused the loggers to become critics and independent thinkers, and their minds were not fitted for such occupations.

“Work and discipline will repair the damage,” decided Paul Bunyan. “Work is the great consoler, for in it men forget the torments and oppressions of life. And nothing is more tormenting and oppressive to men of muscle than ideas. My loggers shall forget them. And strong discipline shall release them from the troublous responsibilities of independence. Again I shall have a camp of men who toil mightily and make the hours between supper and sleep jolly with merry songs and humorous tales.”

Saying this, Paul Bunyan rose and looked over the fir forest which covered all the hills and threw shadows far over the silent waters of the whale corral. The great logger regretted that he could not remain here and fell these splendid trees; but something more than plain logging was needed for his present purpose. A powerful task must be set for his men, but a task that would not require arduous labor from the blue ox. New Iowa best suited his need. There the climate was as healing and mild as the one which Kansas had possessed before the turnover of its sinfulness. Paul Bunyan’s maps showed that New Iowa had great forests of orange palms in its valleys, and his samples proved that these trees were tough cutting. The start for the New Iowa country should be made at once.

Paul Bunyan went first to the camp office and called out the Big Swede. He gave orders for Babe to be harnessed and hitched to the camp buildings; then he called, “Roll out or roll up!” for the loggers. They came out slowly, rubbing their eyes and expressing wonder, for they had been sleeping only a short while. When their leader told them that he was going to take them down to New Iowa they did not display their usual childish excitement over a move; but they looked from one to another with knowing grins and much eye-winking. The bunkhouse cranks whispered, “Ol’ Paul’s off on another wild goose chase”; and some of the boldest among them declared that they had never seen better logging than the Oregon country offered, and if they had their way about it they’d stay right here.