The snubbing-post was a huge beech, sawed to leave four feet of stump. It had been adzed to the smoothness of an axe-handle. The three-inch hawser clasped it with four turns, and two men, whose hands were protected by huge leather mittens, kept the squalling coils loosened and paid out the slack, when the cable was hooked to the load of logs on its way down the slope in order to hold it back. And when the coils yanked themselves loose and the rope ran too swiftly, even making the leather mittens smoke, Wade, with his cant-dog, threw the hawser hard against the stump and checked it. It was a trick that Tommy Eye taught him, and it required muscle and snap. At the instant of peril he drove his cant-dog's iron nose into the roots of the stump, surged back on his lever, and pinched the rope between post and ash handle of the tool. Friction checked and held the load, but it was muscle-stretching, back-breaking labor. And all the time there was the rope to watch to make sure that no rock's edge or sharp stick had severed a strand, for broken strands uncoil like a spring under the mighty strain. There were the flipping bights of the coiled hawser to guard against as the men paid it out. Men are caught by those bights and ground to horrible death against the snubbing-post. In time that rope came to have sentiency in the eyes of Wade. Some days it seemed to be possessed by the spirit of evil. It would not run smoothly. It fed out by jerks, getting more and more of slack at each jump. It began to sway and vibrate between post and load, a wider arc with every jerk, a gigantic cello-string booming horrible music. It snarled on the post; it growled grim and sinister warning along its tense length. So terrible are these wordless threats that men have been known to surrender in panic, flee from the snubbing-post, and let destruction wreak its will. Hence the silent and understanding partnership between Tommy Eye, shadowed by death on the load, and Dwight Wade fiercely alert at the snubbing-post. There came a day when the spirit of evil had full sway. The weather was hard, with gray skies and a bone-searching chill. The hawser, made smooth as glass by attrition, was steely and stiff with the cold. It had new voices. Once it leaped so viciously at the legs of one of the post-men that he gave a yell and ran. In the tumult of his passion and fear Wade cursed the caitiff, his own legs in the swirl of the bights, his cant-dog nipping the rope to the post and checking it short. And far down the slope Tommy Eye, his teeth hard shut on his tobacco, waited without turning his head, a mute picture of utter confidence. It was while Wade held the line, waiting for the men to re-coil the hawser into safe condition to run, that the Honorable Pulaski Britt appeared. He came trotting his horses down the Enchanted main road and jerked them to a halt at the top of the pitch. Two men were with him on the jumper. Each wore the little blue badge of a game warden.