formed
a continuous trough the bottom and sides worn smooth with friction of
sliding timbers. Stella had crossed it the previous evening and wondered
what it was. Now, watching them at work, she saw. Also she saw why the
great stumps that rose in every clearing in this land of massive trees
were sawed six and eight feet above the ground. Always at the base the
firs swelled sharply. Wherefore the falling gangs lifted themselves
above the enlargement to make their cut.

Two sawyers attacked a tree. First, with their double-bitted axes, each
drove a deep notch into the sapwood just wide enough to take the end of
a two-by-six plank four or five feet long with a single grab-nail in the
end,--the springboard of the Pacific coast logger, whose daily business
lies among the biggest timber on God's footstool. Each then clambered up
on his precarious perch, took hold of his end of the long, limber saw,
and cut in to a depth of a foot or more, according to the size of the
tree. Then jointly they chopped down to this sawed line, and there was
the undercut complete, a deep notch on the side to which the tree would
fall. That done, they swung the ends of their springboards, or if it
were a thick trunk, made new holding notches on the other side, and the
long saw would eat steadily through the heart of the tree toward that
yellow, gashed undercut, stroke upon stroke, ringing with a thin,
metallic twang. Presently there would arise an ominous cracking. High in
the air the tall crest would dip slowly, as if it bowed with manifest
reluctance to the inevitable. The sawyers would drop lightly from their
springboards, crying:

"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"

The earthward swoop of the upper boughs would hasten till the air was
full of a whistling, whishing sound. Then came the rending crash as the
great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber stood in its path,
followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact with the soil. The
tree once down, the fallers went on to another. Immediately the
swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, denuding it of limbs; the
buckers followed them to saw it into lengths decreed by the boss logger.
When the job was done, the brown fir was no longer a stately tree but
saw-logs, each with the square butt that lay donkeyward, trimmed a
trifle rounding with the axe.

Benton worked one falling gang. The falling gang raced to keep ahead of
the buckers and swampers, and they in turn raced to keep ahead of the
h