The stamping and banging, the clatter and crash, the smoking, sucking and grinding of meal time had never sounded with more vigor and power than on this wild winter morning. Breakfast done, the loggers came forth wiping their mouths with flourishing swipes of their fists, and with much snorting thumb-blowing of noses. When they were back in the bunkhouses, they laced up their boots, arguing loudly the while as to whether true savages, real tough bullies, would wear mackinaws when it was only forty below zero.
“Mackinaws?” yelled the majority. “Where’s your red bully blood, you Hunyoks? Mackinaws! Hell, no, burlies; we won’t even button the collars of our shirts!”
And then Ford Fordsen, camp tinker, bunkhouse handyman, and prophet, got an idea which swiftly ran through all the bunkhouses.
“Real rough, red-blooded, burly, bully, savage, dirt-stomping, ear-chewing, tobacco-loving, whisker-growing, hell-roaring He Men are not going to wear their boots and pants like we’ve been doing,” said he. “Look you now: here’s a ten-inch boot top, here are two inches of wool sock above it; and there’s a pants’ leg all tucked down nice and pretty inside of it. Mates, it looks too delicate. It is no way for a fire-eating logger to wear his duds. Here now; watch me and do as I do, and be a real band of honest-to-God bullies. This way—look!”
He jerked open his horn-handled old knife, and he slashed off the legs of his tin breeches, his mackinaw pants and his overalls, just below his knees. He bit off a jaw-full of fire cut and then stood up, his fists on his hips, an unshaven cheek bulging with pepper-flavored tobacco, shapeless hat down over one eye, collar unbuttoned, suspenders stretching over his expanded chest, and—high mark of all high marks, distinction of distinctions—his pants ending in ragged edges below his knees. An inch of red drawers’ legs showed below them, there followed bands of green wool socks, then black boot tops. Stagged pants! The finishing touch! Poetry was crushed to earth, never to rise triumphantly again in Paul Bunyan’s camp. The inventive and prophetic Ford Fordsen had about killed it.
The great leader was delighted beyond words when he saw the loggers in their new costumes. He smiled indulgently when he heard some of the more modest among them saying that the brush would not bother them greatly now, and that Ford Fordsen’s invention was a mighty good useful one. This is the reason loggers of to-day give for stagging their pants. But Paul Bunyan knew that his men had all taken up with the invention because it suited their natures, which had come back to them. Most of them indeed, admitted it. The loggers of our time should also be frank and admit that stagged pants spring from the he-bulliness of their souls. As Paul Bunyan said, “Etiquette, dainty speech, sweet scents, poetry and delicate clothes belong properly in the drawing-room, the study and the sanctum. They are hothouse growths. Loggers should take pride in hard labor and rough living. Anything that helps their Hesomeness makes them better men. All glory to you, Ford Fordsen, for the invention of stagged pants.”
He offered the bunkhouse genius his little finger. Ford Fordsen got his arms a fourth of the way around it, and the two inventors shook hands.
The months went on and the loggers’ rugged virtues continued to gain strength from the virile buffalo milk hot cakes. They did noble work among the sage trees and felled so many of them that the Big Swede and the blue ox had to go in a gallop during their working hours to snake all the logs to the landings.
Now, this was the year which is mentioned in history as the Year of the Hard Winter. But the bitterest cold could not now chill the blood of Paul Bunyan’s He-Men. They had never been so jolly as they were this Christmas, and they jigged and chortled when Paul Bunyan gave each of them a knife devised especially for pants-stagging. The great leader had cut out thousands of these excellent presents from two of Babe’s old ox shoes. This was the merriest holiday season the camp had ever known, and even the incredible cold of New Year’s Day did not lessen the noisy bunkhouse gayety.
On the last night of the old year the mercury in the great thermometer which hung on the camp office had dropped to four hundred degrees below zero. Then the tube burst, and no one could tell the temperature, but it got appreciably colder. The next morning the boiling coffee froze on the stove, despite the desperate stoking of the kitchen firemen, and the loggers had to drink hot brown ice for their morning’s breakfast. But they tramped cheerfully to work, nevertheless, cracking their mittened hands together and stamping the ground as they went along. They worked so hard to keep warm on this day that they talked and swore but little. This was fortunate. For on this incomparable New Year’s Day every spoken word froze solidly in the air as soon as it was uttered. The next day the temperature rose, but the words remained frozen, and many a logger bumped his mouth by walking into the HELLOS and DAMNS which were solid in the air. But the hardy victims only laughed through their split lips at such accidents. These words all thawed out at once on a warmer day; they melted in one long-drawn-out, mournful echoing shout so unhumanly humorous in sound that the loggers rolled with laughter to hear it.