Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/68

 “If you two men oughtn’t to be in an asylum for the feeble-minded! The idea of standing in a drenching rain this whole afternoon, trying to pull a saw away from each other!”

“But, Mary, we didn’t pull the saw all the afternoon; when we found we had struck a lignum vitæ instead of a fir tree, we gave it up. But we’ve got you some dandy wood; we will bring it down in the morning.”

“Snake it down?”

“I hardly know,—what do you think, Bert?”

“Better not,” said that gentleman, frowning thought fully. “Your team is just a little bit too light.”

The next morning I saw them unloading their precious fuel,—a preponderance of bark, and a few small mossy poles, about such as one uses to support aspiring Lima beans. I called Mary to come and see the “dandy wood.”

“It’s just what I expected,” she cried indignantly. “Snake it down! I guess not, unless they had poked those little sticks through the links of the chain.”

“But, Mary, they could have bunched them like cheese-straws, you know.”

Then we got to laughing, and fancying all sorts of nonsensical things.

“Wouldn’t these mossy little twigs be lovely standing about the room in vases, burning like those Chinese incense tapers?”