Part 14

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!”