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Updated: June 24, 2025
Then came the rending crash as the great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber stood in its path, followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact with the soil. The tree once down, the fallers went on to another. Immediately the swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, denuding it of limbs; the buckers followed them to saw it into lengths decreed by the boss logger.
He found out promptly when he ordered his swampers to advance with their axes and begin chopping down the trees on the right of way. At the first "chock" ringing out on the crisp silence of the woods Ward came running down the snowy stretch of tote-road, presenting much the same appearance as would an up reared and enraged polar bear.
"What do you call that?" the boy shouted back. "Prospecting engine for swamp use," answered the driver. "Don't you swampers ever get the news?" The car, or whatever it was, moved on downstream and so out of sight. "Now I wonder what that was," Val said aloud as his mount sidled toward the center of the road.
The sounds of the "swampers'" axes and the "saw-gangs" were now heard in the forest from daylight until dark, where huge logs were being felled, trimmed, skidded and rolled down into the new dam, to be "boomed," and released after every thaw in early spring, and sent on their way to the mill. The Overland girls still lingered.
But a man involved closely in the practical management of a saw log may conceivably possess scant leisure to correlate the scattered efforts of such divergent activities. The cross cutters and swampers may get ahead of the fellers and have to wait in idleness until the latter have knocked down a tree.
The nights had proved that they could not climb the lugger's side, and when he was in her the canoe was laid athwart her gunwales; but at night he had to drop the bit of old iron that served for an anchor, and the very first night a large moccasin not of the dusky kind described in books, but of that yet deadlier black sort, an ell in length, which the swampers call the Congo came up the anchor-rope.
He made four trips the first day and at dusk had the satisfaction of beholding many tons of rails, fish-plates and spikes unloaded and neatly piled in the yarding place at the Spinnaker end of the carry. Between trips, while the men were unloading, he had opportunity to extend his right-of-way lines for his swampers and attend to other details of his engineering problem.
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.
There is nothing more impressive than this rush of a pine top, excepting it be a charge of cavalry or the fall of Niagara. Old woodsmen sometimes shout aloud with the mere excitement into which it lifts them. Then the swampers, who had by now finished the travoy road, trimmed the prostrate trunk clear of all protuberances. It required fairly skillful ax work.
Presently arose the ringing whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, that injury came to one, that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a battlefield. A few minutes thereafter the two men who had gone with Sam Davis returned with the spring from Benton's bed and a light mattress.
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