Paul Bunyan

by James Stevens

What would certainly have been the grandest curse of history was interrupted by the appearance of Johnny Inkslinger on the summits of the Cascades. Paul Bunyan’s wrath and chagrin vanished and the light shone once more into his eyes as his interested gaze followed the timekeeper’s progress. Shagline Bill’s endless freight team circled down the mountains behind Johnny Inkslinger. Paul Bunyan dropped Ford Fordsen carelessly into his pocket and stepped up the slopes to hear the news.

Johnny Inkslinger had a condensed report of fifteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one pages which dealt with the destruction of the great farm and the transformation of the Smiling River country in the unnatural rain. But he gave a more cheerful account of a new country which he had discovered. It was just over the mountains, he said, in the region called Nowaday Valley. There he had procured a good load of camp supplies. There were people in that country, the timekeeper went on to say, people of a very strange sort. He described them, and he ended his description by doubting if even one out of a hundred of these people could become a logger. Some were too ponderous, others were marvelously fragile, and everyone held an ax awkwardly.

“I have heard of such creatures,” said Paul Bunyan. “They are real, then. But not another word must be spoken about them. If my loggers were to hear that some of this species which they remember so ardently were at hand, I’d have more trouble than poetry gave me. We must keep this a secret, Johnny Inkslinger.”

Then they rose and walked over to the cookhouse, where the kitchen crew was unloading the freight wagons. Paul Bunyan had forgotten Ford Fordsen. But the impertinent bunkhouse genius had escaped from the pocket during the conversation. He now journeyed towards the woods, where the loggers were doing little but talk over their memories. And it is not difficult to imagine how much work was done after the enraged inventor arrived with his news of Johnny Inkslinger’s discovery.

Paul Bunyan, with energy that was unusual even for him, at once began to put the mill in a condition to operate. It was a good mill as it stood, outside of the solid saw, and he did not intend to rebuild it. That would take time, and he wanted to have new bunkhouses and the old camp routine as soon as possible. In order to keep his men from thinking about their troublesome memories it was necessary to have most of them in the woods again and to be with them himself. Then the bunkhouse bards would start the camp stories and songs once more, and the loggers would be protected at night also. So, to work.

Experienced as he was with inventing, Paul Bunyan was not long in getting an idea which solved his problem. First, he had the loggers who were detailed on mill construction build blocks of concrete under the floor beams of the millhouse. While they were completing this labor he got one of his old inventions and made many new models of it. This invention was the steam-drive potato masher, which he had devised for Hot Biscuit Slim, after the chief cook had originated mashed potatoes. In this invention Paul Bunyan had made the first known use of the steam cylinder. He now took a battery of steam-drive potato mashers and installed them on the new concrete blocks under the mill. Steam pipes were connected between them; and the new mill system was ready for a trial.

Paul Bunyan wiped the sweat from his dripping eyebrows and wrung out his beard; then he gave the signal to turn on steam. The potato mashers pumped up and down perfectly at the rate of five hundred strokes a minute. Each stroke thrust the mill building up forty feet and down forty feet. The big carriage moved forward, carrying a pine log; the solid saw met its bark and grain; then the log carriage, flashing up and down with the millhouse, moved swiftly ahead, and the first cant dropped on the rolls. The new mill was a success! Paul Bunyan’s inventive mind had triumphed again! True, the mill men got a little seasick from going forty feet up and forty feet down five hundred times a minute; but they soon got accustomed to this and declared that they preferred the bouncing saw mill to the ordinary quiet kind.

Now Paul Bunyan remembered Ford Fordsen.

“You would rebuild a mill because of a slight mistake,” he chuckled, reaching into his pocket for the bunkhouse genius. “Come now; I will show you how really simple it was to solve the problem of the solid saw.”

But Ford Fordsen was not in Paul Bunyan’s pocket, of course. He had not been there for a long time. Paul Bunyan quickly guessed that the bunkhouse genius had escaped while his leader was seated. The great logger’s last sitting had happened just one month ago, when he heard his returning timekeeper’s report. Certainly Ford Fordsen had gone to the woods with news of Johnny Inkslinger’s discovery.