over the fields. His pipe lay beside him. Now and then he took it up and smoked, but in a moment put it down again and sat bent, with locked hands. His dog slept beside him on the warm, brown earth.

Over! So much was over, never to come again!

"Anyhow, we burned him," said John Dargan. "He deserved burning."

When he had said that he again fell silent. Sky and earth lay in dim purple, very far spread and quiet. A white star became visible, then another. Afar in the wood began a whippoorwill. "Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!"

Edie! The day they were married in the log church! Edie! "Till death do us part."

"Edie, we killed that devil-killed him slow! Edie! Edie! Wed

that for you anyhow

When Paul grew up he invented logging and all the tools and methods used in that industry. He found no precedents, and adapted his operations to local conditions. In the mountains he used Babe, his big blue ox, to pull the kinks out of the crooked loggingroads; on the Big Onion he instituted the policy of hauling a section of land at a time to the landing; in North Dakota he used the seven axmen.

It was Paul who invented the grindstone the winter he logged off North Dakota. Before that the axmen used to sharpen their tools by rolling rocks downhill and running alongside of them. In Dakota neither hills nor rocks were to be found, so Paul rigged up the revolving rock. The seven axmen could now grind an ax a week, but the little chore boy, whose job it was to turn the stone, did not feel

very enthusiastic about the invention. The first stone was so big that, working at full speed, every time it turned › around once, it was pay-day.

After many experiments and failures, Paul invented the two-man saw. He first made one from a strip of sheetiron that had been thrown away when the cook's dinner-horn was manufactured. The saw reached over a quarter-section, the smallest unit that ever entered Paul's calculations. It worked well in a level country despite the fact that all the trees fell back on the saw; but on rough and hilly ground only the tops were trimmed off, and in the pot-holes the saw passed them over altogether.

The winter of the deep snow everything was buried. Paul had to dig down deep to find the tops of the tallest pines. He had the snow dug away from them, and lowered the sawyers down to the base, as in a mine. When they had cut the tree, it was hauled to the surface by a long parbuckle chain to which Babe, Paul's blue ox, mounted on snow-shoes, had been hitched. been hitched. When it became impossible to buy enough stovepipe to reach the top of the snow, Paul had Ole make stovepipe by boring out logs with a six-inch auger.

All of Paul's inventions were successes with the exception of his scheme to run three ten-hour shifts a day and to use the aurora borealis for a source of artificial lighting. The plan was given up because the lights were not dependable.

Many of Paul's plans were upset by the mistakes of straw-bosses and foremen. For instance, once Chris Crosshaul, a careless cuss and one of Paul's camp bosses, took a drive down the Mississippi, and when the logs got to

New Orleans, it was found that the wrong tow had been taken down. The owners looked at the brands and refused to accept the logs. It was up to Paul to take them back up-stream. No one but Paul could ever have tackled such a piece of work. Driving logs up-stream is impossible, but no impossibilities ever stopped Paul Bunyon. He fed Babe a good big salt ration and drove him to the upper Mississippi to drink. Babe drank the river dry, and sucked all the water up-stream, and the logs went up the river faster than they came down.

Paul's inventiveness never showed up to better advantage than when he tackled the mosquitos of the North Country. Those alone who have encountered that particular mosquito can appreciate what Paul was up against when he was surrounded by vast swarms of the ancestors of the present-day insects, getting their first taste of human flesh and blood. The present mosquito is but a degenerate remnant of his ancestors. Now he rarely weighs more than a pound or measures more than a foot from tip to tip.

Paul had to keep his men and oxen

in the camps, with doors and windows bolted. Men with pike-poles and axes were stationed on the roofs to fight off the insects that were trying to lift the shakes off the roof in order to gain admittance. The lives of Paul and his crew were saved only because the big buck mosquitos started a fight and trampled down the weaker members of the swarm.

Paul made up his mind that the menace would be removed for the following logging season. He thought of the big bumblebees back home and sent for several yokes of them. Sourdough Sam brought out two pairs on foot. To control the flight of the beasts, their wings were strapped with surcingles. Sam provided them with walking-shoes when they checked their stingers with him.

But the cure was worse than the original evil. The bees and the mosquitos made a hit with one another; they intermarried, and their offspring was worse than the parent stock. They had stingers fore and aft, and got their victims coming and going. The bee blood in them was the cause of their ultimate destruction. A flower is not much to an insect with a

ten-gallon stomach, so their craving for sweets could be satisfied only by sugar and molasses in large quantities. One day the whole tribe flew across Lake Superior and attacked a fleet of ships carrying sugar to Paul's camps. They destroyed the ships, but ate so much sugar that they were no longer able to fly, and were all drowned. Paul kept one pair of the original bees at headquarters camp, and they provided honey for the hot cakes of the crew for many long years.

Paul may not have invented geography, but he created a lot of it. The Great Lakes were first constructed to provide a water-hole for Babe. It is not quite clear what year the job was finished, but the lakes were in use the year of the two winters.

The winter Paul logged off North Dakota, he hauled water for his ice roads from the Great Lakes. One day when Brimstone Bill, using one of the old tanks, was making his early morning trip, the tank sprang a leak when they were half-way across Minnesota. Bill climbed Babe's tail and was saved from drowning, but after it was realized that the tank could not be patched up, it was abandoned; and the

water all leaked out and formed the Mississippi River. The truth of this is established by the fact that the old river is still flowing.

In the early days, when Paul went broke between logging seasons, he traveled around, like all lumberjacks, doing any kind of pioneering work he was able to find. He showed up in the State of Washington about the time that the Puget Construction Company, Limited, was building Puget Sound, and old Billy Puget was breaking the world's record for moving dirt by using dirt-throwing badgers. Paul and Billy got into an argument about who had shoveled the most. Paul got mad and said he 'd show Billy Puget, and started to shovel the dirt back again. Before Billy stopped him, he had piled up the San Juan Islands.

bark came off, and then run ashore on the bubbles. He once threw a peaveyhandle into the Mississippi at St. Louis and, standing on it, poled up to Brainerd, Minnesota. Paul was a "white-water bucko" and rode water so rough that it would tear an ordinary man in two to drink out of the river. Like all pioneers, Paul was a mighty hunter. Alongside of him, old Nimrod himself would have looked like a city dude lost from his guide. He was also a good fisherman. Old-timers tell of seeing Paul, as a small boy, fish off the Atlantic coast. He would sail early in the morning in his three-masted schooner, and wade back before breakfast with his boat full of fish on his shoulder.

About that time he got his shot-gun, which required four dish-pans full of powder and a keg of spikes to load each barrel. With this gun he would shoot geese so high in the air that they would spoil before reaching the ground.

Tracking was Paul's favorite sport, and no trail was too old or too dim for him to follow. He once came across the skeleton of a moose that had died of old age, and, just for curiosity, picked up the tracks of the animal and spent the whole afternoon following its trail back to the place where it was born.

With capable workmen Paul was a friend as well as an employer. Their relations were excellent. For Paul was, before everything else, thorough. He did not fool around clocking the crew with a stop-watch, counting motions and deducting the ones used for borrowing chews, going for drinks, dodging the boss, and preparing for quitting time. He decided to cut out labor altogether. He hitched Babe to a section of land and snaked the whole

640 acres at one drag. At the landing the trees were cut off just like shearing a sheep, and the denuded section was hauled back to its place. Six trips a day for six days a week just cleaned up a township, for Section 37 was never hauled back to the woods on the Saturday night, but was left on the landing to be washed away by the water in the early spring. Documentary evidence of the truth of this assertion is offered by the government surveys: no map in existence shows a township with more than thirty-six sections.

$4

From all accounts, the family life of Paul Bunyon was very happy. Mrs. Bunyon first appeared in the life of Paul as the cook of one of his camps. She specialized on soft-nosed flapjacks, which could not be produced unless cooked over a hot fire made of prune-pits. She used to call the men to dinner by blowing into an old woodpecker hole in a hollow stub that stood near the door of the cook-house. In this stub there was a nest of owls that had only one short wing and could not help flying in circles.

Mrs. Bunyon used to mother Paul affectionately. When some lumberjack with artistic proclivities attempted to make a sketch of Paul, Mrs. Bunyon, with wifely solicitude, parted Paul's hair with a hand-ax and combed it with an old crosscut saw.

Jean was Paul's youngest son. When he was three weeks old, he jumped out of his cradle one night and, seizing an ax, chopped the four posts out from under his father's bed. The incident greatly tickled Paul. He used to brag about it, and declared with fatherly pride that some day the

boy would be a great logger. In due course of time Jean drifted south, and the last heard of him was that he had been hired by a logging company to lift logging-trains past one another on a single-track railroad.

In pioneering days no camp was ever without a dog. Paul loved dogs, with the proviso that no dog could be around that did not earn his keep. So the dogs had to work-hunt or catch rats. That was some job when the rodents around the camp used to thrive on buffalo milk hot cakes and grew to be as big as two-year-old bears.

Elmer, the moose-terrier, practised on the rats when he was a pup, and soon became able to catch a moose on the run and finish him with one shake. Elmer usually loafed around the cook camp, and when the meat supply happened to run low, the cook would appear on the threshold and say "Bring a moose, Elmer." Elmer would catch a moose, bring it in, and repeat the performance until the cook figured that he had meat enough and called him off.

Sport, the reversible dog, was the best hunter of all Paul's canines. He

was part wolf and part elephant hound, and was raised on bear milk. When he was a pup, he was playing in the horse barn one night, and Paul mistook him for a mouse and threw a hand-ax at him. He was cut in two, but Paul, realizing his mistake before it was too late, stuck the two parts together and bandaged him up. With careful nursing the dog recovered, but it developed that Paul, in his haste, had put the two halves together so that the hind legs pointed straight up. This proved later to be an advantage to the animal. He learned to run on the two front legs for a while, and then to turn around without loss of speed and run on the other two. Because of this he never tired. Anything he went after got caught. While still a pup, he broke through four feet of ice on Lake Superior and was drowned.

The shaggy dog that spent most of his time pretending to sleep in front of the camp office was Fido, the watchdog. Fido was the bugbear of the greenhorns who struck camp. They were told that Paul starved him all winter and then, before pay-day, fed him all the swampers, chore boys, and student bullcooks when they came to