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It is a busy time in Maine, where you must prepare for a long winter and for twenty degrees below zero. At last we were ready to start up to the logging camp with the sixteen horses. We hitched three spans of them to a scoot that had wide, wooden shoes, and that was loaded high with bags of grain, harnesses, peavies, shovels, axes, and chains. The other ten horses we led behind by halters.
And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.
And they considered that her return to the fight was nothing less than magical and fear gripped their hearts. Then the French swarmed up the scaling ladders like monkeys, leaped over the ramparts, and a horrible din arose from the interior of the fort, where, amid oaths and outcries and the clangor and crash of axes and meeting shields, the English were savagely slaughtered.
The horn-blowers sounded off a loud funeral march together, and one in particular, a slave belonging to an undertaker, made such a fanfare that he roused the whole neighborhood, and the watch, which was patrolling the vicinity, thinking Trimalchio's house was afire, suddenly smashed in the door and rushed in with their water and axes, as is their right, raising a rumpus all their own.
The barricade was next attacked, some using axes, others darting their swords and halberts through the crevices and killing those behind; as for those who had firearms, they climbed on the shoulders of the others, and having fired at those below, saved themselves by tumbling down again.
A short stick was cut as a guide to the space that was to be left between the rungs. Bertie and Jose marked off the distances on the two poles, and Dias and Harry with their axes cut the grooves in which the sticks were to lie. Then the poles were laid a foot apart, and the work of pressing the sticks into their places began.
On the drawbridge, standing sentinel, was a French man-at-arms, a young man of my own age, armed with a long fauchard, which we call a bill or halberd, a weapon not unlike the Lochaber axes of the Highlandmen. Other soldiers, French, Scottish, Spaniards, Germans, a mixed company, were idling and dicing just within the gate.
In a moment the fighting turned to slaughter, the long German pikes and broad axes were of no use at close quarters. Instead of it the swords of the horsemen fell upon helmet and neck. The horses pressed into the midst of the throng, upsetting and trampling the unfortunate Germans.
Next come the flanged axes, with projecting ledges on either side; and then the palstaves with loops and ribs, each marking some new improvement in the character of the weapon, which the inventor would no doubt have patented but for the unfortunate fact that patents were as yet wholly unknown to Bronze Age humanity.
This having been determined, the men next chopped notches of the right depth for the insertion of short boards to afford footholds high enough to enable them to nick the tree above the swell of the roots. Standing on these springy and uncertain boards, they began their real work, swinging their axes alternately, with untiring patience and incomparable accuracy.
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