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Updated: May 15, 2025
Then when I came they shouted, and one gray-headed warrior cried: "Now you have a good fight on hand, axeman." Then I asked: "Who are the strangers?" "It is a ship of the Jomsburg vikings," he said. "They know that our men are all in England, and have come to see what we have left behind Thor's bolt light on them!" Now, of all savage vikings these Jomsburgers are the worst.
The man had a few inches of springy wood which bent and heaved beneath him to stand upon, but the great blade descended exactly where the last chip had lain, and when it hissed aloft again that of the silent axeman dropped into the notch it made.
To-day one would in all probability look for that dwelling in vain, and find only stores or great stone buildings, for as the silent men with the axes push the lonely clearings farther back into the forest the Western cities grow, and those who dwell in them increase in riches, which is not usually the case with the axeman who goes on farther into the bush again.
Neither of us was an adept at handling an axe. But Agathemer, with his half Greek ancestry and his wholly Greek versatility and adaptability, taught himself to be a good axeman in ten days. I bungled and blundered away at it all winter.
Legends about him had spread through the army and were the common gossip round the camp fires of his duel with the German axeman on the Island of the Rhine, and of the blow with his fist which broke the leg of a Scythian's horse.
"It is very kind of you to come," he said, taking her hand. He made shift to limp to the door, whence he called for Mattawa. "Bring those two chairs out, Tom, and put them in the sun," he said. The old axeman shook his head severely. "You sit right down again. What in the name of wonder are you on your legs for, any way?" he asked. Then he saw Laura, and made a little gesture of resignation.
He had the day before him and what a day it was! Cameron lay upon a buffalo skin in front of the cook-tent, content with all the world and for the moment with himself. Six months ago he had engaged as an axeman in the surveyors' gang at $30 per month and "found," being regarded more in the light of a supernumerary and more or less of a burden than anything else.
Supper was served with as much ceremony as was possible at Somasco, but the meal was a somewhat silent one. The ranchers were a trifle anxious while the surveyor spoke most to Alice Deringham, who sat next him near the head of the table, and the member of the Government divided his observations between the wife of a big axeman and Mrs. Forel.
It had cost his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as much he had answered: "Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.
Two or three engineers, a rodman, a leveller, and an axeman came in, near behind them more cattlemen. From among the guests of the hotel several came, and presently the clerk of the hotel himself. The line of men grew steadily, but the body upon the opposite side of the room remained constant, immobile, and unchanged. At these devoted beings there glared many eyes from across the room.
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