of roots narrow little trails down through the forest from the
pine to the skidway at the edge of the logging road. The trails were
perhaps three feet wide, and marvels of smoothness, although no attempt
was made to level mere inequalities of the ground. They were called
travoy roads (French "travois"). Down them the logs would be dragged and
hauled, either by means of heavy steel tongs or a short sledge on which
one end of the timber would be chained.

Meantime the sawyers were busy. Each pair of men selected a tree, the
first they encountered over the blazed line of their "forty." After
determining in which direction it was to fall, they set to work to chop
a deep gash in that side of the trunk.

Tom Broadhead and Henry Paul picked out a tremendous pine which they
determined to throw across a little open space in proximity to the
travoy road. One stood to right, the other to left, and alternately
their axes bit deep. It was a beautiful sight this, of experts wielding
their tools. The craft of the woodsman means incidentally such a free
swing of the shoulders and hips, such a directness of stroke as the
blade of one sinks accurately in the gash made by the other, that one
never tires of watching the grace of it. Tom glanced up as a sailor
looks aloft.

"She'll do, Hank," he said.

The two then with a dozen half clips of the ax, removed the inequalities
of the bark from the saw's path. The long, flexible ribbon of steel
began to sing, bending so adaptably to the hands and motions of the
men manipulating, that it did not seem possible so mobile an instrument
could cut the rough pine. In a moment the song changed timbre. Without
a word the men straightened their backs. Tom flirted along the blade
a thin stream of kerosene oil from a bottle in his hip pocket, and the
sawyers again bent to their work, swaying back and forth rhythmically,
their muscles rippling under the texture of their woolens like those of
a panther under its skin. The outer edge of the saw-blade disappeared.

"Better wedge her, Tom," advised Hank.

They paused while, with a heavy sledge, Tom drove a triangle of steel
into the crack made by the sawing. This prevented the weight of the tree
from pinching the saw, which is a ruin at once to the instrument and the
temper of the filer. Then the rhythmical z-z-z! z-z-z! again took up its
song.

When the trunk was nearly severed, Tom drove another and thicker wedge.

"Timber!" hallooed Hank in a long-