The loggers were royally received into the grand life of Topeka. The skill they displayed in spinning logs on the lake each Sunday won them an honored place in the kingdom. They became tireless players of poker, solo, rummy, craps, and even of pool. They drank huge quantities of beervine brew and whisky tree sap. The free lunch made them forget the delights of Paul Bunyan’s dinners. Soon they ceased to consider themselves as working loggers, and they repelled with scorn proposals to try a new life of toil, which were slyly made by followers of Duke Dryface, who was a cousin of the King.
The duke was secretly planning a revolt. He had renounced Topeka life, and he now lived among the serfs who brewed the beervine blossoms, aged the sap of the whisky trees, and made all of the materials that composed the grand life of Topeka. The serfs were called Cornmen, after a harsh cereal which they had devised, and which they all raised in clearings among the whisky tree forests. Duke Dryface planned to drive the king and his nobility and gentry from the country and clear off the forests, level the hills and make the whole state into a flat corn country. The king thought him simply a harmless old crank, and would listen to no warnings against him. But, nevertheless, the duke had a revolt well planned for the coming Fourth of July celebration. After bribing the bartenders, he had substituted raw sap for the mild and gentle aged liquors to be served on that day; he had the Cornmen all grandly inspired, and perfectly drilled, instructed and armed; though he had not converted the loggers, he had directed the bartenders to fill their glasses with triple-distilled, high-powered redeye sap on the night of the Fourth, and he was sure that he could capture them and keep them in bondage until the last whisky tree was felled. The duke did not fear Paul Bunyan, for he thought the loggers’ stories about him to be drunken exaggerations; he thought of him as some plain leader whom they had basely deserted, and who would no doubt be happy to see them punished by slavery. He kept the strength and extensiveness of his power well hidden, and the loggers lived on blissfully in ignorance of their real danger.
For many days and nights after the stampede of his loggers Paul Bunyan had toiled on, swinging his timber scythe with undiminished rapidity. He had not observed the desertion of his men, or the flooding of his camp, or the fate of the stonewood trees. But at last his energy and strength began to fail, his pace slackened, he swung the scythe with slower strokes, and the intervals between the rolling thunders of falling trees became longer and longer. Then the timber scythe dropped from his hands, and he sank to the ground. Now he saw for the first time the shimmering distances of salt water which covered the stonewood trees and all but the tallest buildings of his camp. For seven hours he gazed on the lamentable scene, then his head dropped to the ground. He was not disheartened; he was only tired. He slept.
Days and nights went by with little change in the unnatural season. The days of springtime came, but here there was no spring. Summer days began, the sultriness of the nights got increasingly heavy and thick, and in the daytime the overpowering blaze of the sun seemed to make the very hills shrink, while the surface of the lake was veiled in steaming mists. The slumbers of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Inkslinger, the Big Swede and the blue ox became so deep that the active careers of all of them might have ended there ingloriously had it not been for Babe’s appetite, which always tormented him, sleeping or waking. The Big Swede was couched on the high-piled hay in the manger, and Babe’s chin rested on his body. Stirred by a hunger that would not be denied, his jaws began to work mechanically; they closed over the fifty pound plug of chewing tobacco that the Big Swede always carried in his hip pocket, and it was swallowed like a blade of grass. Babe gasped, groaned, and shuddered; then he lunged to his feet, snorting and bellowing, for chewing tobacco was as poisonous to him as to a circus elephant. He gouged the Big Swede viciously with his horns until he awoke with yells of agony and astonishment. And not until he saw, through the stable door, Paul Bunyan asleep on the far side of the lake did Babe heed the foreman’s powerful remonstrances. With a last angry toss of his horns, which threw the Big Swede through the stable window, Babe turned and plunged into the water. So fast did he run that he threw foaming waves to the furthest reaches of the lake. When he reached Paul Bunyan he emitted a joyous bellow and eagerly began licking the great logger’s neck. For one hour and twenty-seven minutes Babe assiduously tickled him, and then Paul Bunyan sprang to his feet with a great roar of laughter. He felt strong and fresh; he smiled cheerfully at the blue ox, who capered around him. He straddled Babe and rode him across the lake to the flooded camp. There he awakened Johnny Inkslinger, and, refusing to listen to his apologies, he sent him out to discover the trail taken by the loggers. By the time it was found, Paul Bunyan and the Big Swede had the camp out of the water and ready to move. Babe was hitched to the buildings and the search for the errant loggers began. As he traveled on Paul Bunyan said nothing; his head was bowed in painful meditation. There was still wrath in his heart for his loggers’ desertion of him, but there was more of loneliness. Excepting the pleasures of history-making, invention and oratory, there had never been any joy for him like the joy that comes from the comradeship of labor, and he wished to feel it again. Then he feared that the loggers might be completely lost; they were as helpless as sheep, without understanding guidance. One moment he swore to punish them severely, then his heart would be softened by sad and gentle thoughts. So engrossed was he with perplexing ideas and troubling emotions that he did not notice the decline of heat and the new sweetness in the air as the balmy clime of Kansas was approached....
A Fourth of July in Topeka during the reign of King Bourbon! Who would not give his fame and fortune to have participated in one of those marvelous celebrations! What pale and weakly imitations we have nowadays of the ball games between the Fats and the Leans, of the potato races, and of all the other ingeniously devised contests which made the last day of King Bourbon’s reign a long procession of glories and wonders! When will we see again parades, marches and drills performed by uniformed organizations as they were performed by The Bartenders’ and Bookmakers’ Bands, The Knights of the Spotted Cubes, The Mystics and Oracles of Fistiana, The Stentorian Order of Umpires, The Grandiose Guild of Jockeys, The Loyal Legion of Log-burlers and many others on that historical day in Topeka? The last-named society was a new organization that was composed of Paul Bunyan’s loggers. They aroused the wildest enthusiasm when they appeared in the line of march treading beer kegs, and for this, and for their triumphs in the races, King Bourbon awarded them the grand prize.
The bar had been closed for the celebration, and when it was opened in the evening no one in the spruce and jocund throngs which streamed through its doors suspected that treason was afoot. Clinking of glasses, guffaws, jigging feet, back-slapping, bellowed songs and shouted jests made a tumult of rollicking and boisterous noise as the reveling began. Urged on by the traitorous bartenders, the nobility and gentry drank nothing but the sap of the whisky trees. It was a mild, mellow and soothing beverage when properly aged, but the raw green sap which the conspirators had supplied would suddenly addle the mind and paralyze the nerves. The loggers, flushed with conceit over their day’s triumph, boasted that they were champion drinkers also, and they dared everyone to enter drinking contests with them. The bartenders, obeying instructions, filled the loggers’ glasses with triple-distilled, high-powered redeye. So they were the first to get bleary-eyed, to wilt and to stagger about. By the time the nobility and gentry had begun to be affected the loggers had all stumbled outside or had been carried out. Too late the king and his followers realized that they were the victims of a conspiracy. When the fumes of the powerful green sap had completely befuddled them the spies of the Cornmen lighted the signal fires that were to start the attack.
In a short time the hosts of Cornmen, with husking hooks strapped to their left wrists, and with corn knives swinging from their right hands, charged, whooping and bounding, into the city. King Bourbon and his followers, deaf, weak-kneed, color-blind, dumb and addled, could make no resistance. They were driven through the streets, out of the city, on through the whisky tree forests and headed towards the far lands of Kentucky. Duke Dryface remained behind with the greater part of the Cornmen to secure the loggers, who were laid out in heaps, rows, circles, squares and fantastic groups all over the city. In three hours half of the loggers had balls and chains locked to their legs. Duke Dryface had begun to breathe easily and to enjoy the first glow of complete triumph when he became conscious of a vast shadow, an overpowering presence. The light of the moon seemed blotted out, the ground shook under a monstrous tread; then sounded a bellow of rage that lifted every Cornman and every logger seven feet into the air and whirled them all over five times before they struck the ground again. The rudely awakened and sobered loggers and the affrighted Cornmen then saw the august figure of Paul Bunyan and the blue ox looming above them. The good and mighty man was chiding Babe for bellowing so loudly and was restraining him from attacking the Duke and his followers.
Duke Dryface had the courage of true virtue. He fearlessly stepped up to Paul Bunyan and began a speech. First he spoke of the sins of King Bourbon and of the oppressions suffered by the Cornmen; he showed the necessity for reform. Next, he went on to prove that sin was in the very soil of Kansas, and that this soil could only be purified by destroying the evil forests and raising virtuous corn in their stead. That was his main reason for wanting to make slaves of the loggers, he said, but he hoped also to make righteous men of them later. Paul Bunyan nodded gravely for him to go on, and the duke then rose to the grandest heights of eloquence in describing the moral imperfections of the loggers. Deserters, braggarts, beer-bibbers, gluttons, cigarette fiends, and many other evil names he called them. Paul Bunyan listened, and the loggers got sick with shame and fear. They had surely sinned, they were indeed lost souls, they felt; they would forever despise themselves. Then, just when they had reached the lowest depths of self-loathing and despair, they saw Paul Bunyan give an enormous wink. Only a wink, but what forgiveness flashed from it, what unshakable faith seemed fixed in its depths! That one gesture of an eyelid restored and consoled them, for it spoke pardon and promised to forget. The duke declaimed until dawn, but the loggers listened complacently, grinning knowingly at each other. Once more they would toil grandly in the woods, once more hot cakes, ham and eggs would sizzle for them on the long kitchen ranges, once more they would be delighted by the wonders of noble Sunday dinners, for by the wink of his eye Paul Bunyan had made them his loggers again....
Paul Bunyan contracted for the logging-off of the whisky trees, and this was easily accomplished by the inspired toil of the loggers. The country was flattened by hitching Babe to each section of logged-off land and then turning it over. As Duke Dryface had surmised, the land, though rolling on top was flat underneath. So the one-time sinful soil of Kansas now lies deeply buried, and only the barest vestiges of the grand life devised by King Bourbon survive anywhere in the Kansas country.