variety of cookies and doughnuts, and strong green tea.
Thorpe found himself eating ravenously of the crude fare.

That evening he underwent a catechism, a few practical jokes, which he
took good-naturedly, and a vast deal of chaffing. At nine the lights
were all out. By daylight he and a dozen other men were at work, hewing
a road that had to be as smooth and level as a New York boulevard.

Chapter VI

Thorpe and four others were set to work on this road, which was to be
cut through a creek bottom leading, he was told, to "seventeen." The
figures meant nothing to him. Later, each number came to possess an
individuality of its own. He learned to use a double-bitted ax.

Thorpe's intelligence was of the practical sort that wonderfully helps
experience. He watched closely one of the older men, and analyzed the
relation borne by each one of his movements to the object in view. In a
short time he perceived that one hand and arm are mere continuations of
the helve, attaching the blade of the ax to the shoulder of the wielder;
and that the other hand directs the stroke. He acquired the knack thus
of throwing the bit of steel into the gash as though it were a baseball
on the end of a string; and so accomplished power. By experiment he
learned just when to slide the guiding hand down the helve; and so
gained accuracy. He suffered none of those accidents so common to new
choppers. His ax did not twist itself from his hands, nor glance to cut
his foot. He attained the method of the double bit, and how to knock
roots by alternate employment of the edge and flat. In a few days his
hands became hard and used to the cold.

From shortly after daylight he worked. Four other men bore him company,
and twice Radway himself came by, watched their operations for a moment,
and moved on without comment. After Thorpe had caught his second wind,
he enjoyed his task, proving a certain pleasure in the ease with which
he handled his tool.

At the end of an interminable period, a faint, musical halloo swelled,
echoed, and died through the forest, beautiful as a spirit. It was taken
up by another voice and repeated. Then by another. Now near at hand,
now far away it rang as hollow as a bell. The sawyers, the swampers, the
skidders, and the team men turned and put on their heavy blanket coats.

Down on the road Thorpe heard it too, and wondered what it might be.

"Come on, Bub! she means chew!" explained old man Heath kindly. Old man
H