"Just the same as that," replied Britt, complacently. "I've had him more than twenty years, and I'd like to see him try to go to work for any one else, or any one else try to hire him away." He struck his hand on the young man's knee. "Up this way, if you don't make men know you own 'em, you're missin' one of the main points of forestry!" He sneered this word every time he used it in his talk with Wade. The new chaney man began to wonder how much longer he could endure the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt without rising and cuffing those puffy cheeks. CHAPTER IV THE BOSS OF THE "BUSTERS" "If you don't like our looks nor ain't stuck on our kind, Git back with the dames in the next car behind." On and on went the yelping staccato of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt. The Honorable Pulaski D. was discoursing on his favorite topic, and his voice was heard above the rattle and jangle of the shaky old passenger-coach that jolted behind some freight-cars. "Forty years ago I rolled nigh onto a million feet into that brook there!" shouted the lumber baron of the Umcolcus. His knotted, hairy fist wagged under the young man's nose as he pointed at the car window, his unwholesome breath fanned warmly on Wade's cheek, and when he crowded over to look into the summer-dried stream his bristly chin-whiskers tickled his seat-mate's ear. The September day was muggy and human contact disquieting. Wade shrank nearer the open window. The Honorable Pulaski did not notice the shrinking. He was accustomed to crowd folks. His self-assertiveness expected them to get out of the way. "Yes, sir, nigh onto a million in one spring, and half of it 'down pine' and sounder'n a hound's tooth. Nothing here now but sleeper stuff. It's a good many miles to the nearest saw-log, and that's where I'm cutting on Jerusalem. I tell you, I've peeled some territory in forty years, young man." Wade looked at the red tongue licking lustfully between blue lips, and then gazed on the ragged, bush-grown wastes on either side. While he had been crowding men the Honorable Pulaski had been just as industriously crowding the forest off God's acres. The "chock" of the axe sounded in his abrupt sentences, the rasp of saws in his voice. "We left big stumps those days." The hairy fist indicated the rotten monuments of moss-covered punk shouldering over the dwarfed bushes. "There was a lot of it ahead of us. Didn't have to be economical. Get it down and yanked to the landings--that was the game! We're cutting as small as eight-inch spruce at Jerusalem. Ain't a mouthful for a gang-saw, but they taste good to pulp-grinders."