Such impudence was not long tolerated, of course, and it got so that every morning found buffalo boys mourning for lost ears and doctoring the wounds made by sharp calks. But buffalo milk was running hot in their veins, and their new courage carried them to still greater extremes. One morning when the loggers came to work they found that every sage tree had B. B. burned into its bark. That day the drive was not talked about, for the loggers plotted vengeance as they toiled. This night they turned the buffalos out of the corral, and the buffalo boys were out until morning rounding up the herd. The following night they, in turn, galloped past the bunkhouses and roped every stovepipe that stuck above a roof. They dragged them into the timber and hid them, and the loggers had to dress by cold stoves the next morning. That evening, during milking time, the loggers slipped into the buffalo boys’ tents and poured water into their blankets; the next morning the loggers found their boots all filled with ice, for the buffalo boys had played such an evil trick on them during the night. The astonishing audacity of these lowly creatures was not to be longer endured. Mark Beaucoup and his followers would not listen to the pleas of the moderates that the punishment of the buffalo boys be left until the drive was finished. The bunkhouse cranks had grown savage in the He Man country, and they now threw aside all restraint. They yelled their rage until all the loggers got excited; and in a short time the bunkhouses were empty, and the loggers were marching on the buffalo boys’ camp. They closed in silently and attacked with lion-like ferocity. The buffalo boys, their timidity vanished now, stood up and gave vigorous battle. When Paul Bunyan stepped into camp and called, “Roll out, my bullies! Roll out for the big drive!” he got no answer. Then he looked toward the buffalo corral and saw a sea of dust surging over miles of the valley. All over the gray surface of this sea fists were flashing up as whitecaps jump and fall on wind-blown waters. Paul Bunyan leaped towards the scene of conflict. But the great logger’s endeavors to separate the fighters were vain. When he got among them he had to stand still for fear of trampling them; the buffalo boys and the loggers crowded against his feet as they clinched and punched, and some of them rolled under the arches of his boots. He ordered the factions to their camps, but they would not hear. Then Paul Bunyan bellowed. The battlers were all thrown down, but they bounced up fighting. Ears and fingers were now flying up everywhere in the dust, and the leader was alarmed by the thought that a more fearful condition was in sight than even poetry had threatened to bring about. The ferocious masculinity that his two gangs of men had got from the virile hot cakes would leave him with camps of earless and fingerless cripples. Disaster loomed over the logging industry once more.