gigantic trunk bounded from the
stump, recoiled like a cannon, crashed down, and lay conquered, with a
roar as of an earthquake, in a cloud of flying twigs and chips.

When the dust had cleared away, the men at the log on the outside of the
clearing could not see Luther. They ran to the spot, and found him
lying on the ground with his chest crushed in. His fearful eyes had not
rightly calculated the distance from the stump to the top of the pine,
nor rightly weighed the power of the massed branches, and so, standing
spell-bound, watching the descending trunk as one might watch his
Nemesis, the rebound came and left him lying worse than dead.

Three months later, when the logs, lopped of their branches, drifted
down the streams, the woodman, a human log lopped of his strength,
drifted to a great city. A change, the doctor said, might prolong
his life. The lumbermen made up a purse, and he started out, not very
definitely knowing his destination. He had a sister, much younger than
himself, who at the age of sixteen had married and gone, he believed, to
Chicago. That was years ago, but he had an idea that he might find her.
He was not troubled by his lack of resources: he did not believe that
any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless." He had always
been able to turn his hand to something.

He felt too ill from the jostling of the cars to notice much of anything
on the journey. The dizzy scenes whirling past made him faint, and he
was glad to lie with closed eyes. He imagined that his little sister in
her pink calico frock and bare feet (as he remembered her) would be
at the station to meet him. "Oh, Lu!" she would call from some
hiding-place, and he would go and find her.

The conductor stopped by Luther's seat and said that they were in the
city at last; but it seemed to the sick man as if they went miles after
that, with a multitude of twinkling lights on one side and a blank
darkness that they told him was the lake on the other. The conductor
again stopped by his seat.

"Well, my man," said he, "how are you feel-ing?"

Luther, the possessor of the toughest muscles in the gang, felt a sick
man's irritation at the tone of pity.

"Oh, I'm all right!" he said, gruffly, and shook off the assistance the
conductor tried to offer with his overcoat. "I'm going to my sister's,"
he explained, in answer to the inquiry as to where he was going. The
man, somewhat piqued at the spirit in which his overtures were