Since leaving the Hickory Hill country, they had done little of the grand work for which they were born. They had lost a great deal of their innocent pride and self-respect in toiling with picks and shovels; and Johnny Inkslinger’s abandonment of scientific medical practice for medical oratory had shaken their faith in the integrity of his knowledge and the scope of his power. In the time when he had written his figures and made his cures without explaining and glorifying them the loggers had regarded him as a worker of mysteries and had been in great awe of him. But now that he had revealed his mind from a soap box the loggers only remembered his eloquent boasts and his failure to make good. Alcohol and Epsom salts seemed common to them now, and they laughed at the camp doctor for having had to go back to them. Paul Bunyan heard them poking rough fun at Johnny Inkslinger’s folly on their first night in the Oregon camp, after the return was made from the Wet Desert country. “In words there is a magic poison which is more powerful than the plain substance of them,” mused Paul Bunyan. “This magic whips emotions and stuns sense, and it overpowers any mind which is one part sense and nine parts emotion. And these loggers of mine ... these loggers of mine....” Another clamor broke out in the bunkhouses, and Paul Bunyan, smiling sadly, listened to hear what nonsense his men were talking now. The bunkhouse cranks were the leaders in the new uproar, and when the master logger heard their words and the applause that followed, his eyebrows drew down in a frown which the moonlight could not penetrate, and his eyes had a hard glitter in the shadows. For the bunkhouse cranks were saying that it looked like logging couldn’t last much longer now; the old blue ox was in a bad way and it was hard to think he’d ever be himself again in this here world; Johnny Inkslinger was getting so childish that he’d probably lose his figuring power, just as he had blundered in his doctoring; and old Paul himself--it looked like even he was losing his hold, as he had started to dig Babe’s grave before the blue ox was even near dead. Old Paul would never have given in that soon in the days on Onion River, said the bunkhouse cranks. Things would surely go from bad to worse, they agreed, and it was no use to look for the good old times to come back. The same talk was going on in all the bunkhouses and the bards had few cheerful arguments against it. The loggers were losing their old innocent, exuberant, devil-may-care spirit.