ORATORICAL MEDICINE
Beforethe second season in the Hickory Hill country there had never been a great sickness in Paul Bunyan’s camp. The health his loggers constantly enjoyed was due to the skill of Johnny Inkslinger, who was physician and surgeon, as well as timekeeper, to the good and mighty Paul Bunyan. His surgical feats were marvelous. When ears were bitten off, for example, in the playful jousts with which the loggers amused themselves, it was no trick for Johnny Inkslinger to sew them on tightly again. And when a logger got his face walked on by calked boots the timekeeper would fill the resulting cavities with bread crumbs, slap on some red paint, and the victim of play would return to the frolic, happy and unmarred. But it was digestive ills which he understood completely; for Paul Bunyan’s loggers like the laborers and farmers of to-day, had most of their physical miseries in the mysterious regions about the stomach. His knowledge was gained by the most arduous study and extensive research. The timekeeper wrote reports and figured all day, he dosed the loggers and operated on them in the evening, and the night long he read doctor books. His Sundays and holidays he spent among the wild creatures of the forests and seas, and these he studied shrewdly and patiently. He examined fleas, he explored whales, he once found the bones of amoose who had died of old age, and he tracked the animal to its birthplace, noting all its habits and methods of life on his way. His knowledge was monumental and complete, but he was content to remain a timekeeper in position and name.
In the second season on Hickory Hill the life of the camp went on as usual for a long time. For twelve hours each day the axes rang in the undercuts, the saws sang through bark and grain, and there was everywhere the death shudder, the topple and crashing fall of lofty trees. The blue ox placidly snaked the logs to the riverside, following the Big Swede, who, lost in dreams every trip always walked on into the water. The fumes and exhalations of the great cookhouse were never richer with delightful smells. In the evenings the bunkhouses were loud with gleeful roars as the loggers punched and kicked each other in their pastimes. As the work went on Paul Bunyan grew certain that this would be his greatest season among the hardwoods. His heart warmed toward his men. He planned for them feasts, revels, largesses, grand rewards. All his thoughts were benevolent ones as he directed operations. Then, at the height of his record-breaking season, Babe, the blue ox, got a misery.
It was a sly, slow, deceitful illness. It was first marked in the decline of his sportiveness and affection. It was his habit, when yoked and harnessed in the morning, to make for the woods at a roaring gallop. Always the Big Swede would grip the halter rope andtry to hold the blue ox to a walk; always Babe would plunge on, dragging the Big Swede after him; and always the dutiful foreman would hit the ground once in every ninety feet, yell, “Har noo!” and then be yanked into the air again, for Babe would pay no heed to the bouncing boss. In the woods the blue ox always had to be closely watched, for he would chew up the trees in his jestful moments as fast as they were felled, and on the great drives he would prankishly drink the river dry, leaving the astounded rivermen mired in the mud of the stream bed. He was forever gouging the Big Swede with his sharp horns or tickling Paul Bunyan’s neck with his tongue.
When this playful spirit of his slackened and he began to walk slowly to the timber each morning, it was first thought to signify the approach of maturity, with its graver moods. But when Paul Bunyan discovered him one day, standing with his front feet crossed, his head bowed, his cud vanished, and with tears rolling from his half-closed eyes, the great logger was alarmed. He called Johnny Inkslinger from among his ledgers and ink barrels and ordered him to drop all other work until Babe’s ailment was diagnosed and cured.
Though he had studied all animals exhaustively, Johnny Inkslinger had never practised veterinary medicine, except in treating Babe’s inconsequential attacks of hayfever and asthma. If he took the case he would be assuming a great responsibility, he told Paul Bunyan; he must have at least forty-seven hours toconsider the matter. The great logger, having due respect for the scientific temperament, granted him this, so the timekeeper retired to his office.
Paul Bunyan waited patiently, despite the fears and anguish that smote him when Babe looked at him with beseeching eyes. Work had been stopped in the woods, and the anxious loggers spent most of their time around the stable. The cooks, remembering Babe’s fondness for hot cakes and fried eggs, brought him tubfuls of them most delicately cooked, but he would only nibble at them politely, then turn away. Once indeed his old jestful spirit returned when the Big Swede came near him. He set his hoof on the foreman’s foot, and at the anguished “Har noo!” he seemed to smile. But what a difference there was between that shadow of merriment and the one time gay bellow that always followed the joke! Paul Bunyan and the loggers were deeply touched.
Johnny Inkslinger finally announced in a scientific speech that he was prepared to examine and treat the blue ox. He was certain, above all, that this illness was not caused by indigestion, for Babe’s stomach had always seemed to be iron-clad, invulnerable. When the hay supply ran low in the wintertime Paul Bunyan would tie a pair of green goggles over Babe’s eyes and he would graze for weeks on the snow. He was fond of the wires that bound his bales of hay, and he had always eaten them without apparent injury. So Johnny Inkslinger ignored Babe’s stomachs, but every other part of him, from muzzle to tail brush, was minutely scrutinized and explored. Nothing escapedobservation. Six intrepid loggers with lanterns were lowered by ropes into his throat to examine his tonsils when he stubbornly refused to say “Ah!” But no diseased condition could anywhere be discovered.
Johnny Inkslinger was baffled, but he would not give up. For sixty-one hours he sat in the stable, watching every movement of the blue ox and making pages of notes about each one. And all of the time he was thinking with the full power of his scientific mind, bringing all his vast medical knowledge to the solution of his problem. Then, just as he had reached the darkest depths of hopelessness, a flashing idea saved him with its light. The idea did not spring from his science or knowledge; indeed, it seemed to be in opposition to them. It was a simple idea, simply inspired.
His gaze had been fixed for some time on the hump which the blue ox had on his back. It was such a hump as all ailing animals contrive, but, unoriginal as it was, it was yet the source of an original and startling idea, that the hump in a sick animal’s back, instead of being theresultof the sickness, was really thecauseof it! Johnny Inkslinger jumped to his feet with a shout of joy. He saw in the idea, not only the salvation of Paul Bunyan’s logging enterprises, but the root of a great fame for himself as a veterinarian as well. His jubilant calls soon roused the camp.
Paul Bunyan listened somewhat doubtfully as the timekeeper revealed his idea and plans. But he was not one to oppose a scientific man with mere logic, so he gave orders that the great treatment devised by Johnny Inkslinger should be carried out. For five days the loggers toiled, erecting a scaffold on each side of the blue ox. Runways were built from the top floors of the scaffolds to Babe’s back. Then all was ready for the first treatment. For three hours loggers carrying pike poles, peavys, sledges and mauls climbed the scaffolds and extended in lines on each side of Babe’s humped spine. Then Paul Bunyan grasped the horns of the sick creature, Johnny Inkslinger and the Big Swede seized his tail, the command, “Get ready!” was given, then, “Let’s go!” Paul Bunyan said, and the army of doctors began the cure. All that day, through the night, and for seventy-six consecutive hours thereafter the loggers attacked the hump in Babe’s spine, while Paul Bunyan, Johnny Inkslinger, and the Big Swede attempted to stretch it to its former shape by tugging on the poor animal’s horns and tail. Babe mooed dolorously indeed while this treatment was being performed, and the tears rolled from his saddened eyes in foaming torrents. But he did not resist. Intelligent animal that he was, he knew that his friends were only trying to drive away his misery. And kindly of soul as he was, it was no doubt as much to give them the pleasure of success as to stop them from prodding, pounding and stretching his spine that he made a heroic effort to act as cured ox. Pretty deceiver! Once he had straightened his aching back, how lustily he began to devour bale after bale of bitter-tasting hay from his manger! How speedily he emptied tubfuls of hot cakes and fried eggs, while Hot Biscuit Slim, Cream Puff Fatty and the assistantcooks looked on and cheered! Never did Babe depart more friskly for the woods than on the morning he was pronounced cured. The Big Swede, hanging to the halter rope, only hit the dirt once in every mile and a half!
Man with pipe petting ox
The work of logging was soon in its old routine, but Paul Bunyan was not satisfied. Babe could not hide his spells of trembling; he moved feverishly; his expression was haggard, his mooings hollow. Johnny Inkslinger, still flushed with the fire of his grand idea, was impatient with Paul Bunyan’s worriment. But he could not quiet the great logger’s fears. When it was noted that Hickory River would suddenly rise three or four feet above its normal level and as suddenly fall again, Paul Bunyan set a close watch on the blue ox and discovered that there were times when the hump in his back became greater than ever before, and that torrents of tears often poured from his eyes in fits of weeping, thus flooding the river. Firmly, but without anger, Paul Bunyan ordered his timekeeper to devise another treatment.
Johnny Inkslinger reluctantly admitted his failure and again brought his powers of thought to consider the perplexing sickness of the blue ox. But he did not labor with the materials of his knowledge and science. He longed to glow again with the tickling heat of originality, to taste once more the sweet fat of his own ideas. So he sat and thought, awaiting inspiration, while his doctor books stood unopened on the towering shelves of the camp office. And at last he was rewarded by an idea that floated from mysteriousdarkness like a bubble of golden light. It was midnight, but his ecstatic shouts awakened the camp. The loggers, thrilled and alarmed, rolled from their bunks and ran in their underclothes to the camp office. A white-clad host soon filled the broad valley and covered the distant hills. Johnny Inkslinger then came out of the office, carrying a box that had held ninety-five tons of soap. He mounted this box and began to speak. His eyes flamed, his hair waved, his hands fanned the air. He was voluble. “Doctor or prophet?” Paul Bunyan asked himself sadly as he strode away, after listening for a short time. But the loggers were enchanted as the speech went on. Johnny Inkslinger ended each period with a mesmeric phrase, and after he had repeated it thrice at the ending of his speech the loggers made a chant of it. “Milk of the Western whale! Milk of the Western whale! Milk of the Western whale!” they roared, as they swayed and danced in their underclothes. The chant rose in thunders to the sky, it rolled over the hickory forests, and it shook the rocks of far mountains. It reëchoed for hours after the loggers had returned to the bunkhouses.
Paul Bunyan considered the situation bravely and calmly. He admitted no vain regrets that he had never studied doctoring himself. He pronounced no maledictions on his timekeeper’s puzzling mania. He simply considered the plain facts of his problem: if Babe died the great logging enterprises would be halted forever; Johnny Inkslinger was the only man who had the science and knowledge to cure the sick ox,and if humored he might return to his senses; a change to the Western coast might benefit Babe, and the milk of the Western whale would surely do him no harm. So the mighty logger decided to move his camp to the West, and there let Johnny Inkslinger give him the whale’s milk cure.
There was great rejoicing in the camp when Paul Bunyan gave orders for the move. The blue ox, seeming to realize that it was made for his benefit, acted as though he was in high spirits when he was hitched to the camp buildings and the bunkhouses loaded with loggers. He skipped and capered along the trail behind Paul Bunyan, Johnny Inkslinger and the Big Swede all the way to the Mississippi. But there he was attacked by innumerable squadrons of Iowa horse flies. He smashed them unmercifully with blows of his tail until the ground for miles around was strewn with their mangled bodies, but the carnivorous insects persisted in their assaults until Babe became blindly enraged. He lowered his head and began a furious charge that did not end until he reached Colorado, where he fell exhausted. The loggers had been made violently seasick by their bouncing journey over the hills, and Paul Bunyan was compelled to call a halt until they and the blue ox had recovered. While waiting, Paul Bunyan and the Big Swede built a landmark by heaping dirt around an upright pike pole, and the great logger was so pleased with the creation that he gave it a name, Pike’s Peak.
The trip to the coast was made without further misadventures, and the loggers were set to work at once tobuild a whale corral, for Paul Bunyan wished to get the cure over as soon as possible, so that his stubborn timekeeper would begin to do some real doctoring. The loggers grumbled loudly at working with picks and shovels; such foreign labor demeaned them, they said. But the exhortations which Johnny Inkslinger delivered from his great soap box, and the alarming condition of the blue ox, who now made no effort to hide his sickness, but lay quietly, with closed eyes, overwhelmed their prejudices, and they made the dirt fly in spite of their dislike for shovels and picks. For nine days and nights they threw dirt like badgers, while Paul Bunyan and the Big Swede scooped it aside and piled it into big hills. Then the whale corral was finished, and Paul Bunyan sent the loggers to the bunkhouses. They were so sleepy and weary that they began to snore before they had put away their tools.
Paul Bunyan kicked a hole in the seaward side of the corral, and the waters of the Pacific roared into the basin. When it was filled he began his famous imitation of the bawl of a lonely whale, and so perfect was his mimicry that in less than an hour an approaching school of the leviathans was sighted. They swam hesitatingly about the opening to the corral for a time, but as Paul Bunyan continued to call ever more cunningly and appealingly, they at last entered the trap. The Big Swede then got his stool and milk bucket, while Paul Bunyan scooped dirt into the corral gate. Johnny Inkslinger was called from the office, and all was ready for the first milking of a creature of the seas.
The Big Swede, who had been raised on a dairy farm in the old country, selected a cow whale that looked like a good milker, and Paul Bunyan, using all his wiles of manner and tricks of voice, soon had her playing about his hands. At last she was gentle and quiet, and, while Johnny Inkslinger held up her tail, the Big Swede came into the water with his bucket and stool and began milking with all the energy and skill that had won him the name of Sweden’s greatest milker in his youth. With the vigorous pressure of his hands, the whale’s milk was soon gushing into his bucket with such force that a dozen fire engines could not have equaled the flow. The gentled whale made no resistance, and the pail was soon filled with healthful, creamy milk. But just as the Big Swede was about to rise from his stool the whale’s calf, who had been swimming angrily about, suddenly charged the great milker and upset him. His head lodged in the milk bucket; he was bent double; and before he could recover himself, the little whale had butted the breath out of him and had spanked him blisteringly with his corrugated tail. This incident frightened the mother whale, and she escaped from Paul Bunyan’s hands; the Big Swede floundered about and yelled from the depths of the milk bucket; and the whole school of whales plunged about the corral in a wild panic. Worst of all, the first milking was spilled.
And indeed they were the whole day securing one bucket of milk. Not until Paul Bunyan thought of letting a whale calf suck his finger while the Big Swede was milking its mother were the sea-going dairymenable to get away from the corral with one milking. But at last the great milker limped to the shore with a foaming pail. He was breathing in wheezes, his clothes were in tatters, and the back of him, from head to heels, was marked from the tail blows of the little whales. He was the sorriest of sorry sights, but he had a feeble smile, nevertheless, in return for Paul Bunyan’s praise.
Babe took his first dose of whale’s milk resignedly and then closed his eyes again in weariness and sighed with pain. Paul Bunyan’s emotions smothered his caution; he ventured to express his doubts about the cure. Johnny Inkslinger immediately ran to the office, brought out his great soap box and mounted it.
“It is a nature cure!” he cried in ringing tones. “It cures slowly because nature cures slowly, but it cures surely and divinely! It is a great cure because it is a great idea, a marvelous idea, a heaven-sent idea, an original idea, my own idea, and it is the idea that will save us all!”
Paul Bunyan looked for a moment into the glowing eyes of his timekeeper and sighed. He did not reply.
For a week the three milked the whales twice daily and dosed the blue ox, while the loggers slept away their weariness. Babe took the whale’s milk meekly, but at each successive dose he swallowed more sluggishly, and after the fourth day he would not open his eyes while he drank. On the day the loggers came from the bunkhouses he refused to drink at all. Only an occasional twitching of his eyelids showed that life yet remained with him.
“He is dying,” said Paul Bunyan.
Johnny Inkslinger mounted the great box which had held the ninety-five tons of soap and began to speak.
“Fellow loggers and Paul Bunyan,” he began. “This miraculous idea, this saving and transfiguringidea——”
“Silence!” commanded the good and mighty logger.
So compelling was the power of that grave and august voice that the loggers hardly breathed as it sounded, and the wind subsided until it made only the faintest whisper among the trees. Then Paul Bunyan made one of his great orations. He did not require a soap box, he made no fantastic gestures, and he spoke simply and smoothly. He reviewed his enterprises and the deeds of his loggers; he dwelt especially on the achievements and faithfulness of Babe, the blue ox. His plain sincerity held the loggers spellbound; for sixty-nine hours the speech went on, and they did not so much as move an eyelash. In conclusion, Paul Bunyan told them that Babe would surely die, and as logging could not be done without him, their last labor together would be to dig his grave. He did not blame Johnny Inkslinger, he said; the best of men may be led astray by their imaginings and fall into evil ways. He had been a great doctor once, and he was a noble scribe still. Then Paul Bunyan solemnly and warningly spoke of the shadowy workings of fate, and in somber utterance he portrayed the pathos of yearnings, the frailty of blessings and the ultimate vanity of all endeavor. In the last threehours of his oration his voice sounded as a tolling bell. Mournfully, mournfully, the moments marched on, and a darkness came over the hills and the sea. From the eyes of each motionless logger the tears streamed unchecked; they formed in puddles around each man’s feet until all of them stood knee-deep in mud. When the oration was finished and they had extricated themselves and cleaned their boots, they made ready, and they left with Paul Bunyan for the North, where he had decided to dig Babe’s grave. The Big Swede stayed with the dying ox, and Johnny Inkslinger hid himself in the shadows of his office.
For a long time he remained there in an agony of thought. Remorse tormented him, though Paul Bunyan had not judged him guilty. But he suffered most from the humiliation of failure. It was his first, but—the thought came like a blinding flash of light—had he failed—yet? His reservoir of ideas was inexhaustible; as long as breath remained in the blue ox he could try other ideas on him. Think now! It had become as easy for him to summon grand ideas as for a magician to conjure rabbits from a hat, and almost instantly he had one, a superb notion, a glorious thought!
Johnny Inkslinger rushed from the office and roused the Big Swede, who was sitting in apathetic sadness by the blue ox.
“Listen now!” commanded the timekeeper. “You are to sit here and repeat continuously in a soothing voice, ‘You are well. You are well. You are well.’ Do you understand? Well then—no questions now—doas I have told you and Babe’s life will be saved. Do not fail, for all depends on your faithfulness! When I have returned with Mr. Bunyan I will finish the cure myself.”
The timekeeper, exulting in the certainty that his method would positively restore health to the blue ox, then started out on the trail of Paul Bunyan and the loggers. They should quit their melancholy task and return to find Babe on the road to recovery. He would complete the cure, and logging should go on as before.
The Big Swede at once began to repeat the words, “You ban well,” according to orders. For thirty-one hours they came from his tongue without interruption. Then his mouth got dry and hoarseness invaded his throat. The phrase was uttered with an effort. Then he had to resort to whispering in Babe’s ear. And finally even his whisper failed him.
The Big Swede had once nearly choked to death after making a high dive into muddy earth, and he had only been saved by copious doses of alcohol. The new oratorical cures were not understandable to him, but he remembered the potency of alcohol in clearing out the throat, so he got up and ran to the camp office, where he found the great carboys of the medicine once highly prized by Johnny Inkslinger. Taking three of them under his arm, the Big Swede returned to the blue ox. He took a huge drink from one of them, and he was again able to go on with the treatment. For a few hours it was only necessary for him to drink once every thirty minutes to drive away the hoarseness,but it resisted stubbornly, and the periods between the drinks grew shorter and shorter. By the time the Big Swede had opened the last carboy of alcohol his brain was addled by the fumes of the liquor, and his heart was softened by its influence until it beat only with sympathy for the blue ox. He forgot what he was to say, and instead of repeating, “You ban well,” he began to sigh, over and over, “Poor ol’ sick feller. Poor ol’ sick feller.” Fortunately this horrid perversion of Johnny Inkslinger’s idea did not last. The Big Swede’s vocal cords finally gave out, the alcohol smothered his will and closed his eyes. He could not resist the fogginess that crept over his brain, and at last he fell over and began to snore.
Babe had lain motionless and silent while the Big Swede was treating him, but when the foreman fell he had knocked over the last carboy of alcohol, and the liquor poured over the nostrils of the blue ox and trickled into his mouth. He groaned, he stirred, his legs quivered. Then he sat up, looking eagerly about for more. He soon spied, through the open door of the office, the glitter of the other containers of liquor. Slowly, painfully, he staggered to his feet. His tongue lolling feverishly, he stumbled towards the office. A desperate swing of his horns crashed in the side of the building, a flirt of his hoofs knocked the tops from the remaining carboys, and in nineteen minutes he had emptied them all. A vat of Epsom salts was cleaned up in seven gulps, barrels of pills and capsules, and cartons of powders were quickly devoured;in half an hour there was nothing left of the old time medicines of Johnny Inkslinger but splinters and broken glass.
Then the alcohol began to surge through the veins of the blue ox. The frisky, exuberant spirit of his healthy days returned. He pranced and sashayed. He lifted his tail and bellowed. His breath came in snorts as he lightly pawed the ground. For a time he was content with such merry gamboling, frolicking and romping about, then he felt a sentimental longing for Paul Bunyan and his mates of the woods, and he started out to find them. But the alcohol mounted to his head, it dimmed his eyes, and he lost the trail. He wandered into the Wet Desert country and was caught in a terrific rainstorm. He toiled stubbornly on, though his befuddled senses had lost all sense of direction and he sank knee-deep into the desert mud at every step. As he struggled ahead, weaving first to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, water rolled from his back and foamed in cataracts down his dragging tail. A river coursed down the crooked path he left behind him. He grew weak again after he had plowed through the mud for hours and the fever had left his blood. When the storm passed his strength left him and he sought rest on a high plateau.
There Paul Bunyan and the loggers found him, after a three weeks’ search which had begun when the Big Swede brought the news of his disappearance. At first the loggers were sure he was dead, and groans ofsorrow rose in dismal thunders from the vast host. But Johnny Inkslinger would not give up hope. He had repelled the lure of grand ideas at last, and he had his old medicine case with him now. In a moment he had emptied its store of alcohol and Epsom salts down Babe’s throat. In a few minutes the blue ox opened his eyes. The loggers frantically cheered. Babe answered them with a bellow that threw even the loggers on the farthest hills to the ground. Though the blue ox was thin and feeble still, the vitality of health was in his voice again. “He is cured!” said Paul Bunyan.
“He is cured!” shouted the loggers, as they scrambled to their feet.
“Yah,” said the Big Swede blissfully.
Johnny Inkslinger alone said nothing. He, too, was cured.
Say the old loggers:
Ever since he took his drunken course through the Wet Desert a stream has flowed down the crooked trail made by the blue ox. It is called Snake River in all the geographies. The great whale corral is known as Coos Bay. And Babe’s unfinished grave has become the islands and waters of Pugent Sound. The Cascade Mountains of Washington were made from the dirt thrown up by the loggers and Paul Bunyan when they began to dig the grave, and a bitter dispute still rages regarding the name for the loftiest peak. The loggers and the people of Seattle call it Mt. Bunyan, the people of Tacoma and the Indians call it Mt. Tacoma, and the geographers and tourists have namedit Mt. Rainier, after the weather, which is rainier there than in any other part of the country.
So say the old loggers.
And loggers are truthful men.