Paul Bunyan wanted to shout and jig like a school-boy, so jubilant was his logger’s soul made by the sight of this marvelous man. Here was the one person who was needed to make his camp a perfectly organized industry, to guarantee the success of his plans to become a maker of history. By hook or crook he must have him.
He tapped the engrossed figurer on the shoulder.
“Paul Bunyan, the master logger, the maker of history and inventor of note, the only living Real American leader-hero of industry, addresses you,” he said impressively.
“I have heard of you,” said the other, extending his hand but not rising. “I am John Rogers Inkslinger, the master figurer, the one and only Real American surveyor. But you must excuse me now, for I am endeavoring to solve the one problem that has ever baffled me. I have been working on it steadily for two months, and still the answer evades me.”
He at once began figuring again, and Paul Bunyan, a little awed, had no words to say at that moment. He had no idea of what a surveyor might be, and he feared that John Rogers Inkslinger was something greater than himself. He would find out. So he said:
“I am a figurer also, though not a great one. Yet I might help you. What is your problem?”
“I am looking for Section 37,” said John Rogers Inkslinger.
“Section 37?”
“Yes. I have only found thirty-six sections in each of the townships which I have surveyed here. There should be thirty-seven.”
Paul Bunyan was delighted that he could solve the problem so easily. “When I first logged off lower Twin Rivers valley,” he said, “I had no logging crews, but only Babe, my big blue ox. The method I used was to hitch Babe to a section of timber—this ox of mine, Mr. Inkslinger, can pull anything that man can walk on—, snake it to the river, shear off the trees, and then haul the logged off land back to its place. I handled a township a week in this fashion; but I always left Section 37 in the river on Saturday night, and the stream would wash it away. Now I judge that you survey the land as I measured it; consequently, you have only found thirty-six sections in each township.”