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We rode over the new-cut hay, up the opposite side, and dismounted at the face of the crags. As we approached them, the number of chambers hewn in the rock, the doors and niches now open to the day, surmounted by shattered spires and turrets, gave the whole mass the appearance of a grand fortress in ruins.

The young man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine, of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of the balsam and spruce, the hemlock and pine of the distant forest. "Great!" he cried aloud, "I never knew anything like it! What a country to train in!"

On the parchment stood the words: "By virtue of this my signature, I make over my soul to the holder of this, after its natural separation from the body." I gazed with speechless amazement, alternately at the writing and the gray unknown. Meanwhile, with a new-cut quill he had taken up a drop of blood which flowed from a fresh thorn-scratch on my hand and presented it to me.

Not entirely unremembered in Alaskan annals is the summer stampede of 1898 from Fort Yukon to the bench diggings of Tarwater Hill. And when Tarwater sold his holdings to the Bowdie interests for a sheer half-million and faced for California, he rode a mule over a new-cut trail, with convenient road houses along the way, clear to the steamboat landing at Fort Yukon.

It was a day in the beginning of harvest a rainy day, coming after so long a time of drought and dust and heat that all rejoiced in it, even though it fell on golden sheaves and on long swaths of new-cut grain. It was not a misty, drizzling rain; it came down with a will in sudden showers, leaving little pools in the chip-yard and garden-paths.

Through the woods and through the town there ran the deep, brown flood of the little bog-born river, and streaking its current for the whole length were the huge, fragrant logs of the new-cut pines, in disorderly array, awaiting their turn to be shot through the mill and come forth as piles of lumber, broad waste slabs, and heaps of useless sawdust.

If Villon was right then this little inch or two of new-cut twig might indeed be all he said, the shadow of death, revenge, hate, and a warning against further attempts of a like kind yet to be faced. But was he right? "Are you quite sure?" "Quite," and Villon nodded. His face was very grave: not for an instant had he slipped into his sardonic mood of ironical jest.

Our seats in the saloon were at the top of the doctor's table, and the doctor himself was a young Irishman of three or four-and-twenty, as bright and breezy as a March morning and as racy of the soil as new-cut peat. Hearing that I was from Ellan he started me by asking if by chance I knew Martin Conrad. "Martin Conrad?" "Yes, Mart Conrad, as we call him.

And oh, the odours of that shop! the fragrant, resinous odour of new-cut pine, the pungent smell of black walnut, the dull odour of oak wood how they stole out in the sunshine, waylaying you as you came far up the road, beguiling you as you passed the shop, and stealing reproachfully after you as you went onward down the road.

Then a detachment of Rudri's men brought sheaves of new-cut corn and bundles of hay from the stackyard, and flinging them within the breach set them in flames. The stout walls of oak very soon caught fire, and Sir Oscar Redmain and his archers on the towers speedily found themselves inclosed in clouds of smoke.