the double wagon load to the waiting yards
of Marshall & Harding. Nothing of the sort was happening. Welton did not
dare go ahead with the water for fear of prejudicing his own case. The
lumber accumulated. And, as the mill's capacity was great and that of
the yards small, the accumulation soon threatened to become
embarrassing.

Bob acted as Welton's lieutenant. As the older lumberman was at first
occupied in testing out his sawyers, and otherwise supervising the
finished product, Bob was necessarily much in the woods. This suited him
perfectly. Every morning at six he and the men tramped to the scene of
operations. There a dozen crews scattered to as many tasks. Far in the
van the fellers plied their implements. First of all they determined
which way a tree could be made to fall, estimating long and carefully on
the weight of limbs, the slant of the trunk, the slope of ground, all
the elements having to do with the centre of gravity. This having been
determined, the men next chopped notches of the right depth for the
insertion of short boards to afford footholds high enough to enable them
to nick the tree above the swell of the roots. Standing on these springy
and uncertain boards, they began their real work, swinging their axes
alternately, with untiring patience and incomparable accuracy. Slowly,
very slowly, the "nick" grew, a mouth gaping ever wider in the brown
tree. When it had gaped wide enough the men hopped down from their
springboards, laid aside their axes, and betook themselves to the saw.
And when, at last, the wedges inserted in the saw-crack started the
mighty top, the men calmly withdrew the long ribbon of steel and stood
to one side.

[Illustration: The men calmly withdrew the long ribbon of steel and
stood to one side]

After the dust had subsided, and the last reverberations of that mighty
crash had ceased to reecho through the forest, the fellers stepped
forward to examine their work. They took all things into consideration,
such as old wind shakes, new decay, twist of grain and location of the
limbs. Then they measured off the prostrate trunk into logs of twelve,
fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, or even twenty feet, according to the best
expediency. The division points between logs they notched plainly, and,
shouldering their axes and their sledge and their long, limber saw,
pocketing their wedges and their bottle of coal oil, they moved on to
where the next mighty pine had through all the centuri