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With his size gang he could not keep a donkey engine working steadily. So they had felled and trimmed to a good start, and now the falling crew and the swampers and buckers were in a dingdong contest to see how long they could keep ahead of the puffing Seattle yarder. Stella sat on a stump, watching.
He packs a meetin' with a lot of swampers that don't know nothin' about the case, and before they gets done they votes a strike, and an old feller from this Craw Door gets his time. Gets kicked to death, the same as they uster in Park City when the Cousin Jacks from the Ontario cut loose on one another. The Denver council takes cawgnizance of this, and investigates.
When the trunk was nearly severed, Tom drove another and thicker wedge. "Timber!" hallooed Hank in a long-drawn melodious call that melted through the woods into the distance. The swampers ceased work and withdrew to safety. But the tree stood obstinately upright. So the saw leaped back and forth a few strokes more. "Crack!" called the tree.
But with a muffled gasp he sank back again, pale and weak. Awkwardly Val forced him back against his pillows. "It's all right," he assured him again. But in answer the swamper shook his head violently, "It ain't all right in the swamp." In a flash Val caught his meaning. Swampers lived on house-boats for the most part, and the boats will outride all but unusual floods.
For in that land all was done in those days by stealing; pilfering and robbing were among them from the beginning. And he went forth to battle. Now it was about the middle of the third watch of the night, Came a messenger bearing good tidings unto the Philistines, even unto the Pelicans and Swampers of New Orleans, Saying, 'He has done it, well he has. C'est un fait accompli.
Somewhere in the tangle of refuse boughs the swampers' axes click-clocked, saws uttered their grating, rhythmic snarl, and great trees at intervals shivered, groaned, and fell with soft, rushing, cracking sweeps into the deep snow, and the swampers swarmed upon them like Lilliputians attacking a giant enemy. She began to take on culpability.
He turned and went outside. As he passed Mrs. Field his head was bowed and he was uttering a groaning cry like one suffering acute physical agony. She went out quickly, and Field and Ridgeley followed. They were all moved but the men made little of it, seeing how deeply touched she was. "That's what drink does for a man," Ridgeley said, as they watched Williams disappear down the swampers' trail.
They were instructed to move forward across the forty in a straight line, felling every pine tree over eight inches in diameter. While the "saw-gangs," three in number, prepared to fell the first trees, other men, called "swampers," were busy cutting and clearing of roots narrow little trails down through the forest from the pine to the skidway at the edge of the logging road.
"We can fight on beans, and we'll eat the paper off those giant cartridges if we have to. Don't fail to warn Gordon that the hillside is mined, and warn him loud enough for his swampers to hear." Appleton hastened back to his boats, where he found his men sprawled among the boulders sleeping the sleep of complete exhaustion.
"In the office I have clerks who will be found at the same desk twenty years from now. And in the woods I have hundreds of swampers, skidders, and sawyers who will always be swampers, skidders and sawyers. I have camp bosses who will always be camp bosses, and a few who will become lumbermen.
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