“Bless my soul!” cried John Rogers Inkslinger admiringly. “I should have looked you up before. But I supposed you were an ordinary man of the forests. You would certainly make a great surveyor. You must leave this common life you are leading and come with me. Together we will soon have every section of land in the country staked out perfectly.”
“I have a different idea,” said Paul Bunyan.
Whereupon he unloosed his eloquence, and for the rest of the day his richest phrases were lavished on the surveyor. And this man, sure of the greatness of his own accomplishments, listened with strong doubts for a long time. But at last he was convinced that logging was the greatest of all occupations and that Paul Bunyan towered far above him as a hero.
“I can only think of you with awe and admiration,” he said at last. “But I have my own work, inconsequential as it now seems. So I cannot become your figurer at present. Think, Mr. Bunyan, of Real America’s uncharted rivers, her unstaked plains, her unplumbed lakes! It is my mission to—to——”
His speech ended in a yell of fright as a monstrous red tongue was thrust before his eyes; it passed moistly over his face, it rolled oozily behind his ear; then he heard a “moo” that was as loud as muffled thunder, but affectionate and kind. The surveyor wiped his face and his spectacles and turned fearfully to see Babe, the ox whose hair was blue as the sky, gazing at him, with a pleading tenderness in his bulging eyes.
“Even Babe wants you to come with us,” said Paul Bunyan, his beard shaking in a chuckle. “Such a powerful argument. Now what in thunderation——”
John Rogers Inkslinger had let out a scream of horror that sent Babe galloping back through the timber.
“My instruments!” cried he. “Your infernal clumsy ox has trampled them and demolished every one. What misfortune!” He jumped to his feet and began looking for his books and papers.
“Gone!” raged the surveyor. “That blue devil has eaten them! All of my records, the history of my works—gone! gone! gone! Eaten by an ox! His four stomachs are crammed with them! Gone! gone! gone!”
“Stop that caterwauling,” said Paul Bunyan impatiently. “When my ledgers were ruined, I simply observed, ‘There is no use crying over spilled ink.’ The hero is even more heroic in disaster than in triumph. Be true to your pretensions.”