claim their pay. The thought of being turned into dog-food froze them stiff. Of course those fears were groundless. Paul was not the man to let a dog go hungry at any time or even to mistreat a human being; but he did feed Fido all the watch-peddlers, tailors' agents, and camp inspectors that happened to turn up.

Around Paul's camps the dogs were not the real pets. Babe, the big blue ox, was the darling of the camps, although a trifle large for a household companion. Babe could pull anything that had two ends on it.

Babe was seven ax-handles wide between the eyes, according to some authorities; others equally dependable say forty-two ax-handles and a plug of chewing-tobacco. Like other historical contradictions, this one comes from the use of different standards. Seven of Paul's ax-handles were equal to forty-two and a fraction of the ordinary kind.

They could never keep Babe more than one night at a camp, for he would eat in one day all the fodder that could be toted to the camp in one year. For a snack between meals he would eat fifty bales of hay. He used

to eat them wire and all, and it kept six men with picaroons busy pulling the wire from between his teeth. Babe was a great pet and, as a general rule, very docile, but he seemed to be possessed of a sense of humor, which frequently got him into mischief. He would sneak up behind a drive and drink all the water out of the river, leaving the logs high and dry. It was impossible to build an ox-sling big enough to hoist Babe off the ground for shoeing, but after they logged off North Dakota there was room for Babe to lie down while the operation was being performed. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that every time Babe was shod, they had to open up a new iron mine in Minnesota.

Once in a while Babe would run away and be gone all day, roaming over the Northwestern country. His tracks were so far apart that it was impossible to follow him, and so deep that a man, falling into one of them, could only be hauled out with difficulty and the use of a long rope. Once a settler with his wife and baby fell in one of those tracks, and the son got out when he was fifty-seven years old and reported the accident.

Benny, the little blue ox, as he was always called, was brought to camp when a small calf. Despite his name, he was quite a chunk of an animal. Benny could, or rather would, not haul as much as Babe, neither was he as tractable, but he could eat more.

Paul got Benny from a farmer near Bangor, Maine. There was not milk enough for him at the camp, so he was weaned when he was only three days old. The farmer had only forty acres of hay, which Benny ate in a week, thus forcing his owner to dispose of him. When he came to Paul's camp he was underfed and weighed only two tons. Paul drove from Bangor to Devil's Lake, North Dakota, where his camp was located, in one night. The Western air must have agreed with the little fellow, for every time Paul turned around to look back at him, he was two feet taller.

When they made camp, Benny was given a generous feed of buffalo milk and flapjacks and put into a barn by himself. The next morning the barn was gone. Later Benny was discovered scampering over the clearings with the barn on his back. He had outgrown his home in one night. Benny was very erratic. He refused to pull loads unless there was snow on the ground, and after the spring thaws they had to whitewash the logging-roads to fool him.

Gluttony killed Benny. He had a voracious appetite for hot cakes, and it took one cook and a crew of two hundred men to provide him with his feed. One night he got indigestion. He pawed and bellowed and threshed his tail until he blew down what pine Paul had left standing in North Dakota.

At breakfast-time he broke loose, tore down the cook-house, and

began bolting pancakes. In his greed he swallowed the red-hot stove. Indigestion set in, and nothing could save him.

Lucy, Paul Bunyon's cow, was not, as far as we can learn, related either to Babe or to Benny. There is no basis in fact for the statements that she was their mother, but that she was a most remarkable dairy animal there is not the slightest doubt. Paul himself is authority for the fact that she was part Jersey and part wolf. Her actions and method of living seemed to justify the allegation of wolf ancestry, for she had an insatiable appetite and a roving disposition. She used to eat everything in sight and could never be fed at the same camp as Babe and Benny. In fact, they gave up the idea of feeding her at all, and let her forage her own living. The winter of the deep snow Big Ole fitted her out with a set of Babe's old snow-shoes and a pair of green goggles and turned her out to graze on the snow-drifts. She had some difficulty at first in getting used to her new food, but after a while she took to it with a will and used to roam all over North America, compelling Paul to decorate her with a bell borrowed from a buried church.

Despite short rations, she gave enough milk to keep six men busy skimming the cream. When she fed on evergreen trees, her milk got so strong of evergreen and balsam that the men used it for cough medicine. When she supplied the camps with too much milk, part of it was made into butter, and when the supply of this commodity also became too great for the consuming power of the camps, the surplus was used to grease the skidroads, which enabled Paul to run his logging-sleds throughout the summer.

Paul's master of the oxen was Brimstone Bill. The old bull-whacker's boast was that he knew oxen, that he had worked them, fed them, and doctored them ever since the ox was invented. He was the author of the Skinner's Dictionary, a handbook for teamsters, and most of the terms used in directing draft animals, except mules, originated with him. His early religious training accounts for the fact that the technology of driving teams contains so many names and places mentioned in the Bible.

When the weather was rainy, Babe used a buckskin harness that Bill had made. When this harness got wet, it stretched to such an extent that the oxen could travel to the landing without shifting the load. Bill would then fasten the harness with an anchor that Big Ole had made for that purpose, and when the sun came out and dried the harness, it would shrink, and pull the load in while Bill and the oxen were already at work on some other job. Bill also made his own yokes out of cranberry wood.

Big Ole, the blacksmith, was another character of the Bunyon forces. He first worked for Paul on the Big

If Ole was a master in his line, so were the seven axmen. Their official title was the seven axmen of the Red River, because they had a camp in that locality where there were three hundred cooks besides the little chore boy. The whole State was cut over from that one camp, and the husky seven chopped from morning till sunset and walked to and from work.

Their axes were so big that it took a week to grind one of them. Each man had three axes and two helpers, whose main duty it was to carry the axes to the river when they got redhot from chopping. Each axman would would march through the timber whirling his ax about him, and at

was cut.

The physical measurements of the seven axmen are lost, but it is known that a cord of wood was kept on their table to be used as toothpicks. After supper they would sit on the deacon seat in the bunk-shanty and sing "Shanty Boy" and "Bung Yer Eye" until the people in the settlements down on the Atlantic would imagine that another northwester was blowing. The little chore boy led a strenuous life. He was only a kid, and, like all youngsters putting in their first winter in the woods, he was put over the jumps by the old-timers. His regular work was heavy enough, splitting all the wood for the camp, carrying water and carrying lunch to the men on the job.

He had to take a lot of good-natured roughneck wit about his size, for he weighed only six hundred pounds, and two surcingles were just about enough to make him a belt. What he lacked in size, he made up in grit, and the men secretly respected his gameness. They used to say that he might make a pretty good man if he ever grew up, and considered it an excellent education to give him a lot of extra chores to do.

Often in the evening, after his day's work and the long hours put in turning the grindstone and feeding the camp stoves, which required four cords of wood for kindling, he could be found with one of Big Ole's small six-hundred-pound anvils in his lap, pegging up old shoes with railroad spikes.

Another interesting personality was Johnny Inkslinger, the camp clerk. He invented bookkeeping about the time that Paul invented logging. He was a crank on efficiency and economy

designing his own office appliances. His fountain-pen was made by running a hose from a barrel of ink, and one winter, by leaving off crossing the t's and dotting the i's, he saved nine barrels of ink.

All those secondary personalities of the Paul Bunyon saga are overshadowed by the more vital and significant individuality of the cook. Feeding the crews in the Paul Bunyon camps was no mean task. Conditions were always changing. The winter he logged off North Dakota, he had three hundred cooks making flapjacks for the seven axmen and the little chore boy. At headquarters on the Big Onion he had one cook and 462 cookees, the crew being so big that even Paul never knew within several hundred how many men he had working for him.

Of the cooks themselves there were many. Some were good, others just able to make the grade. One of them seemed to know nothing else than boiling. He made soup out of everything, and did most of his work with a dipper. When the tote-sled broke through the ice on Bullfrog Lake with a load of split peas, he just dipped up the water of the lake, heating it and serving it for pea soup until the crew struck. His idea of a dinner-pail was a jug or a rope on which he froze soup, so that it looked like a candle. Another cook used too much grease. He had to put on calked shoes to keep from sliding out of the kitchen, and rubbed sand on his hands whenever he went to pick something up.

Cooks in the days of Paul Bunyon were divided in two classes, bakingpowder bums and sourdough stiffs. Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter

After all others had failed in the camp on the Big Onion, Paul hired his cousin, Big Joe, who came from three weeks below Quebec. He was the champion cook. He was the only one who ever managed to make enough pancakes to feed the crew all they wanted. He had Big Ole, the blacksmith, make him a griddle so large that you could not see across it when the smoke was thick. The batter, stirred in drums that looked a good deal like concrete-mixers, was poured out by spouts handled by cranes. The griddle was greased by colored boys sliding over it with a slab of bacon tied to each foot. The colored men were the only ones who could stand the heat.

At this camp the flunkies wore roller-skates, and one may gain an idea of the size of the tables from the fact that the pepper was distributed by four-horse teams.

Sending out the lunch and timing the meals became a hard task on account of the three crews. One was going out to the job while another was working and the third was coming home. Joe had to start the bullcook out with the lunch three weeks before dinner-time. Then there was the problem of calling the men in to their meals. The dinner-horn that Big Ole made was so big that only the cook or Paul himself could blow it. At the first attempt Joe blew down ten acres

of pine. of pine. To avoid this, he blew straight up into the air; but this caused several cyclones at sea, and Paul had to junk the horn. It was shipped east, and the sheet-iron was used for the roofing of a big union depot.

The quality of the food served in Paul's camps had a lot to do with the strength and endurance of the crews. Of course the men were a husky lot to start with, but the food itself was of a special kind. The chipmunks that ate the prune-pits grew so big that they ate all the wolves, and years later the settlers shot them for tigers.

The hauling away of the prune-pits and the coffee grounds was one of the worst jobs of the commissary department. It required a big crew of men, and either Babe or Benny was used to do the hauling. Finally, Paul decided that it was cheaper to build new camps and to move every month.

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The legend of Paul Bunyon seems to have originated either in New England or in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes. Certainly he rose to the height of his fame in the Lake region during the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, and later migrated, accompanying the movement of the lumber industry to the Northwest. He is, so far as can now be discovered, a wholly American mythical figure, if not the only one. Robert Frost's poem, "Paul's Wife," in THE CENTURY MAGAZINE for November, 1921, made use of Paul; and he has been the subject of magazine articles and a chap-book; but except for that, he still awaits adequate treatment at the hands of literature.