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Updated: June 12, 2025
"Shiver my topsails, but this comes of disobeying orders," roared the boatswain, in a voice of mingled anger and vexation. "The Ingians are quite as cunning as ourselves, and arn't to be frighted that way. Quick, every cutlass and pistol to his gangway, and let's do our best. Pass the word forward for the axemen to return to quarters."
In places, too, the drought had left pools of dark, still water, difficult to avoid, and not infrequently the entire party must come to a halt while the axemen cleared from the path a fallen birch or hemlock. Every man was afoot, none caring to risk a fall upon the rocks or into the black, cold water of the pools.
Each axeman would march through the timber whirling his axe around him till the hum of it sounded like one of Paul's for-and-aft mosquitoes, and at every step a quarter-section of timber was cut. The height, weight and chest measurement of the Seven Axemen are not known. Authorities differ. History agrees that they kept a cord of four-foot wood on the table for toothpicks.
Suddenly the vast silence of before dawn was broken by a loud and exultant yell from one of the axemen. At once the two scrambled to the top of the dam. The blanketed figures about the fire sprang to life.
There was a murmur, and the guests looked at one another. They were a somewhat mixed company several speculators from the cities, two credited with political influence; well-educated Englishmen, who had purchased land in the hope of combining sport with cattle raising; and wiry axemen, who lived in rough surroundings while they drove their clearings further into the forest, field by field.
Then we halted to wait for the others. After a couple of hours more, as the surveyors had not turned up, we landed and made camp at a spot where the bank rose sharply for a hundred yards to a level stretch of ground. Our canoes were moored to trees. The axemen cleared a space for the tents; they were pitched, the baggage was brought up, and fires were kindled. The woods were almost soundless.
The ordinary backwoodsmen vied together as hunters, axemen, or wrestlers; as they rose to leadership their rivalries grew likewise, and the more ambitious, who desired to become the civil and military chiefs of the community, were sure to find their interests clash.
At no two camps were conditions the same. The winter he logged off North Dakota he had 300 cooks making pancakes for the Seven Axemen and the little Chore-boy. At headquarters on the Big Onion he had one cook and 462 cookees feeding a crew so big that Paul himself never knew within several hundred either way, how many men he had.
They plunged through seas of mud, and grass which grew waist high, and threaded their way along the narrow paths cloven for them by the axemen. So for three days they toiled onward.
Picture the contrast, girl those fine fellows who stood at attention by their gun at Colenso when it was all up with them, and your blessed brother tinkering away at a pink and white muslin heroine that never was on land or sea." "But, but, but," said Kate, "you can't have a world made up of axemen and fine soldiers.
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