“And damn a man who damns figures!” thundered Johnny Inkslinger, himself getting angry.
Whereupon Paul Bunyan damned him again in return, and they kept up a furious argument until the trees began to fall among the bunkhouses. The sourdough drive was a subject that tormented Paul Bunyan’s feelings whenever he thought of it; it was always a sore spot with him. But when he heard the trees tumbling down in the valley he remembered his dignity and he silenced his timekeeper with a majestic gesture. Then he gave instructions for a Sunday feast so huge and diversified that Hot Biscuit Slim, the chief cook, went into a solemn trance of joy upon receiving the order. The timekeeper could not hide his mortification, and Paul Bunyan clapped him on the shoulder, saying cheerily, “There, there, my lad. You live in a world of figures. I could not expect you to know the soul of the born woodsman. But treasure this always: a logging crew works on its stomach.”
After Paul Bunyan had invented logging and brought hosts of little loggers over to Real America to fell trees and drive logs down the rivers, his most baffling problem sprang from the fact that little loggers could not live on raw moose meat as he did. They required cooked food; consequently Paul Bunyan was compelled to build a cookhouse and import cooks. His first cookhouse was a crude affair without any notable mechanical equipment. And his first cooks were men without talent or experience. But Paul Bunyan’s loggers were hardy men whose appetites had never been pampered, and no one complained of the camp fare until Pea Soup Shorty took command of the cookhouse.
Pea Soup Shorty was a plump, lazy, complacent rascal, and he made no attempt to feed the loggers anything but hard-tack and pea soup. He even made lunches for them by freezing pea soup around a rope and sending the loggers’ lunches out to them in sticks like big candles. Even then the loggers did not complain greatly. Not until the winter in the Bullfrog Lake country were they heard to cry out against their food. That winter Shagline Bill’s freight sleds broke the ice on the lake, and the season’s supply of split peas was lost in the water. Pea Soup Shorty did not try to originate any new food for the loggers; he simply boiled the lake water and served it to them for pea soup. Then the bunkhouse cranks began to growl; and finally all the loggers revolted against Pea Soup Shorty; and they declared against pea soup also. Paul Bunyan had to look for another kitchen chief. Old Sourdough Sam was his selection.
The Bunyan histories tell that Sourdough Sam made everything but coffee out of sourdough. This substance is really fermented dough, having the rising qualities of yeast. It is said to be an explosive. Modern camp cooks are always at great pains to warn the new kitchen help away from the sourdough bowl, telling them of the sad accident of Sourdough Sam, who had his left arm and right leg blown off in an explosion of the dangerous concoction.
The old cook brought this misfortune on himself. Sourdough was his weakness as well as his strength. Had he been content to keep it only in the kitchen, where it belonged, and to develop it simply as a food, he, and not his son, Hot Biscuit Slim, might be remembered as the father of camp cookery, even as the mighty Paul Bunyan is venerated as the father of logging. But Sam was prey to wild ideas about the uses of his creation. He declared it could be used for shaving soap, poultices, eye wash, boot grease, hair tonic, shin plasters, ear muffs, chest protectors, corn pads, arch supporters, vest lining, pillow stuffing, lamp fuel, kindling, saw polish and physic. One time he came into the bunkhouse with a chair cushion made out of sourdough. As bad luck would have it, Jonah Wiles, the worst of the bunkhouse cranks, was the first man to sit on it. He always sat hard, and when he dropped on the new chair cushion, he splashed sourdough as high as his ears. Jonah Wiles was fearfully proud of his mackinaw pants, for they were the only pair in camp that had red, green, purple and orange checks. Now the bursted cushion was splashed over all their gaudy colors. Sam apologized humbly and begged the privilege of washing them. His rage showing only in the glitter of his beady blue eyes, Jonah Wiles stripped off the smeared pants and handed them over to the cook. Sourdough Sam recklessly washed them in another of his creations, sourdough suds. Not a thread of color was left in the prized pants; they were a brilliant white when they were returned. The old cook brought them back reluctantly and he was tremendously relieved when Jonah Wiles did not tear into him with oaths and blows. But Jonah Wiles was different from other loggers in that he always concealed even his strongest feelings. So he put on the pants without saying a word, though he was blazing with wrath inside. His rage against the cook was aggravated when his mates began to call him “the legless logger,” because of his invisibility from the bottom of his coat to the tops of his boots when he tramped to work. The brilliant white pants did not show at all against a background of snow.
This unfortunate incident led to the important happenings of the Sourdough Drive, which was one of the turning points in the history of logging. For Jonah Wiles now cherished a vicious hostility against Sourdough Sam; with patient cunning he awaited the time when he might be avenged for the outrage that had made him known in the camp as “the legless logger.”
Jonah Wiles was not a great man among the loggers; he was only a swamper, and Mark Beaucoup, who was a mighty man with both ax and pike pole, was much more to be feared as a bunkhouse crank. But where Mark Beaucoup was a roaring grouch, Jonah Wiles was a sly, quiet one; he had a devilish insinuating gift of making men see and believe uncomfortable things.
“Too bad yer so hoarse to-night,” he would say to a bunkhouse bard who had just finished a song. “I’m thinkin’ we’re needin’ more blankets. Ol’ Paul’ll let us all freeze to death.”
He would lead the bard to think he did have a hoarseness, the bunkhouse gayety would vanish and a seed of resentment would be sown against the master logger. Before his pants were ruined Jonah Wiles had never found a grievance which would serve to keep his instinct of revolt always inflamed. But now his misfortune was in his mind constantly. Without openly attacking the culinary methods and creations of Sourdough Sam, he slyly made a terrible shape of them for his bunkhouse mates.