This work soon gave us
ample means to buy our winter supplies, even though flour was fifty
dollars a barrel. And yet, because of that same hand-logging work, my
wife came very near becoming a widow one morning before breakfast; but
she did not know of it until long afterwards.

It occurred in this way. We did not then know how to scaffold up above
the tough, swelled bases of the large trees, and this made it very
difficult to chop them down. So we burned through them. We bored two
holes at an angle to meet inside the inner bark, and when we got a fire
started there the heart of the tree would burn through, leaving an outer
shell of bark.

One morning, as usual, I was up early. After lighting the fire in the
stove and putting on the kettle, I hastened to the burning timber to
start the logging fires afresh. As I neared a clump of three giants, two
hundred and fifty feet tall, one began toppling over toward me. In my
confusion I ran across the path where it fell. This tree had scarcely
reached the ground when a second started to fall almost parallel to it,
the two tops barely thirty feet apart and the limbs flying in several
directions. I was between the two trees. If I had not become entangled
in some brush, I should have been crushed by the second falling tree. It
was an escape so marvelous as almost to lead one to think that there is
such a thing as a charmed life.

[Illustration: A narrow escape.]

In rafting our precious accumulations of timber down the Columbia River
to Oak Point, we were carried by the current past the place where we had
expected to sell our logs at six dollars a thousand feet. Following the
raft to the larger waters, we finally reached Astoria, where we sold the
logs for eight dollars a thousand instead of six, thus profiting by our
misfortunes.

But this final success had meant an involuntary plunge off the raft into
the river with my boots on, for me, and three days and nights of
ceaseless toil and watching for all of us. We voted unanimously that we
would have no more such work.

The flour sack was nearly empty when I left home. We were expecting to
be absent but one night, and we had been gone a week. There were no
neighbors nearer our cabin than four miles, and no roads--scarcely a
trail. The only communication was by the river. What about the wife and
baby alone in the cabin, with the deep timber at the rear and a heavy
jungle of brush in front? Happily we found them all right upon o