he job was a contract to deliver so many thousand feet of
lumber in the log daily at the mill on the nearest railway. There was a
five-mile haul, and we worked under a boss in crews of four. Each crew
had to deliver eight big logs a day, seven days in the week, three
hundred and sixty-five days in the year. How it was done, when they were
cut, when hauled, was not the boss's affair--just so the logs came. When
we of the crews ate or slept was no one's affair--just so we kept on the
job. No single man could handle one of those big cuts, no single mule
team haul it in places over those cursed mountain roads. That's why we
worked in crews. On the average we worked eighteen hours a day. In summer
this was long, in winter it seemed perpetual; but I was in it and I was
going to stick--or thought I was. The other three in my gang were
middle-aged men,--hard drinkers, good swearers, tough as oak themselves.
The boss was a little tobacco-eating, bow-legged Irishman. I never,
before or since, knew a man who could swear as he could, or drink so when
he struck town. It seems to go with the logging business; but he was a
master.

"I struck this place in the winter. It was in the winter following, again
by chance on a holiday, but Christmas this time, that I quit. They don't
have much cold down in that country and usually but little snow; but this
year there had been a lot,--soft, wet snow, half rain, that melted on the
ground and made the roads almost impassable. For that reason we'd been
getting behind in our contract. We simply could not make two trips a day;
and Murphy, the boss, grew black and blacker. He swore that if we
couldn't make but one trip a day on that one haul we'd have to carry two
logs each instead of one. The thing was barely possible on good roads,
wholly impossible with the ground softened; but he was the boss, his word
law, and before daylight on this Christmas morning we were loaded and on
the road.

"I was on the head wagon with Murphy behind me, the other three
following. The first half-mile was down grade and we got along all right.
Then came the inevitable up grade following and the team began to
flounder. They were mules, of course,--horses could never have stood for
a day the grief of that mountain hauling,--great big-framed, willing
fellows that in condition would pull anything any team could pull; but
now they were weak and tired, and so thin that their bones almost stuck
through their hides from the e