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What the mossbacks thought about it we can safely leave to the crossroad stores. In other respects Bob had the good sense to depend absolutely on his subordinates. "How long do you think it ought to take to cut the rest of Eight?" he would ask Tally. "About two weeks."
"And as for enjoying life, I'll trade jobs with you in a minute, you ungrateful old idiot." "I know it, Jack," confessed Welton; "but what can I do? I can't pick up any more timber at any price. I tell you, the game is played out. We're old mossbacks; and our job is done." "I have five hundred million feet of sugar pine in California. What do you say to going in with me to manufacture?"
Remember that the voices calling from the city deplete the country of many good farmers as well as of many poor ones. Moreover, there are many men on farms who perhaps don't care for farming, but who for some reason cannot get away. On the farm a man need not starve; he can make a livelihood. Doubtless this simple fact is responsible for a multitude of mossbacks.
He went on, in his good-natured, unexcited fashion, to inveigh against the obstinacy of any and all mossbacks. There was no bitterness in it, merely a marvel over an inexplicable, natural phenomenon. "Suppose you didn't get all the logs out this year," asked Bob, at length. "Of course it would be a nuisance; but couldn't you get them next year?" "That's the trouble," Welton explained.
And some of them were ready enough, for a little temporary relief, to part with their birthright to these clever sons of Jacob. "Out we go, to find some other wilderness for them to take away from us! We are only mossbacks," said the daughter of Esau.
"I guess he won't bother us again," said Bob, returning to Welton. The latter laughed, a trifle ashamed of his anger. "Those fellows give me the creeps," he said, "like cats do some people. Mossbacks don't know no better, but a Government grafter is a little more useless than a nigger on a sawlog." He went out. Bob turned to Merker.
The boy waved his hat and birled the log until the spray flew. But hardly was camp pitched two miles below town when one of the jam crew came upstream to report a difficulty. Larsen at once made ready to accompany him down the river trail, and Bob, out of curiosity, went along, too. "It's mossbacks," the messenger explained, "and them deadheads we been carrying along.
At the end of the year it showed a fair return on the investment. "Though we'd have to have it even at a dead loss," Welton pointed out, "to hold our community together. All we need is a few tufts of chin whiskers and some politics to be full-fledged gosh-darn mossbacks." The storekeeper, a very deliberate person, Merker by name, was much given to contemplation and pondering.
"They's been some jobbing done way below our rollways," said Roaring Dick, "and the mossbacks have been taking 'em out long before our drive got this far. Them few deadheads we've picked up along the line; mossbacks left 'em stranded. They ain't very many." "I'll send up a marking hammer, and we'll brand them. Finders keepers." "Sure," said Roaring Dick. He nodded and ran out over the logs.
And is the tribe of mossbacks destined to increase and become a caste of permanent tenants or peasants? Is the future American farmer to be the typical new farmer of the present, or are we traveling toward a social condition in which the tillers of the soil will be underlings?
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