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.