Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/67

 “Yes, and if I had a dollar for—” But our hearers had gone to rejoin the horses, which stood near, literally wreathed in log chains.

The cavalcade had not long been gone, before the rain poured down as if the bottom had dropped out of the water-tanks above. We pitied our men folks then, and their poor horses too, through that long afternoon. Sure enough, about dark, “silently down from the mountain’s crown a great procession swept,” but, look as we might, we could see nothing being “snaked.”

Passing the house, those misguided men looked so miserably wet and bedraggled that we considerately refrained from commenting on “the novel and interesting scene.”

After supper, when the inner man had been refreshed and the outer one was basking in the genial heat of an open fire, the story all came out. It seems they had found a fine tree six feet through, and thinking they might as well “git a-plenty while they were gittin’,” they had tackled it. “Good! Saw it down, saw it down!” But they never got half way through the bark, because, as Bert explained, “Every time I pulled on the saw Tom pulled against me.”

“Yes,” retorted Tom, “and what did you do when I pulled?”

“Well, old man, I said to myself, ‘You don’t get the better of me,’ so I just braced my feet and pulled too.”