rther.

"Got another letter, chummy," said he, "come in yesterday. She tells
me," he hesitated with a blush, and then a happy laugh, "that they ain't
going to be only two of us at the farm next year."

"You mean!" queried Thorpe.

"Yes," laughed Paul, "and if it's a girl she gets named after her
mother, you bet."

The men separated. In a moment Thorpe found himself waist-deep in the
pitchy aromatic top of an old bull-sap, clipping away at the projecting
branches. After a time he heard Paul's gay halloo.

"TimBER!" came the cry, and then the swish-sh-sh,--CRASH of the tree's
fall.

Thorpe knew that now either Hank or Tom must be climbing with the long
measuring pole along the prostrate trunk, marking by means of shallow
ax-clips where the saw was to divide the logs. Then Tom shouted
something unintelligible. The other men seemed to understand, however,
for they dropped their work and ran hastily in the direction of the
voice. Thorpe, after a moment's indecision, did the same. He arrived to
find a group about a prostrate man. The man was Paul.

Two of the older woodsmen, kneeling, were conducting coolly a hasty
examination. At the front every man is more or less of a surgeon.

"Is he hurt badly?" asked Thorpe; "what is it?"

"He's dead," answered one of the other men soberly.

With the skill of ghastly practice some of them wove a litter on which
the body was placed. The pathetic little procession moved in the solemn,
inscrutable forest.

When the tree had fallen it had crashed through the top of another,
leaving suspended in the branches of the latter a long heavy limb. A
slight breeze dislodged it. Henry Paul was impaled as by a javelin.

This is the chief of the many perils of the woods. Like crouching pumas
the instruments of a man's destruction poise on the spring, sometimes
for days. Then swiftly, silently, the leap is made. It is a danger
unavoidable, terrible, ever-present. Thorpe was destined in time to
see men crushed and mangled in a hundred ingenious ways by the saw log,
knocked into space and a violent death by the butts of trees, ground to
powder in the mill of a jam, but never would he be more deeply impressed
than by this ruthless silent taking of a life. The forces of nature are
so tame, so simple, so obedient; and in the next instant so absolutely
beyond human control or direction, so whirlingly contemptuous of puny
human effort, that in time the wilderness shrouds itself to our eyes in
th