His brain racing like a dynamo as it conceived desperate ideas, Paul
Bunyan failed to notice at first that the dust sea had mysteriously
vanished, though the struggle still raged. Not until he saw all the
loggers and buffalo boys stop fighting and throw themselves on the
ground, each man clutching at his own legs and howling with fear,
did he realize that an unnatural happening was saving his men from
exterminating each other. Every frantic fighter was howling, “My boots
is runnin’ over with blood! I’m a goner sure!”
Paul Bunyan heard them with amazement, and with amazement he gazed
on the valleys and hills. A thin mist was rising from the ground. It
vanished soon; then Paul Bunyan saw that rain was springing from the
earth, falling up--if the term may be used--for many feet, and then
dropping back again. The first shower had rained up the legs of the
buffalo boys and the loggers, and they had mistaken it for blood.
Now they were still rolling, moaning and bellowing. Paul Bunyan’s
amazement soon passed, for he was accustomed to unnatural seasons,
climates and happenings. He was all delight that the unusual rain had
stopped the battle, and he saw no harm in it yet; he did not know that
this was a rain of such tremendous force that it had poured through the
earth....
For this was the Spring That the Rain Came Up From China....
Harder and harder the rain came up, and it was not long before the
loggers and the buffalo boys opened their eyes and stopped their
yelling. They were soaked all over now, and they knew that the sudden
warm wetness of their legs had not been from blood. Paul Bunyan laughed
through his beard, which was high and dry, when he saw his men begin
to run for the camp to get out of the strange rain. The fight was
forgotten, and the logging industry was saved.
The ground hissed as the rain came up with new violence. The drops
became streams ... the streams doubled ... trebled ... and in an hour
there were ten streams where only one had come up before. The rain
became a downpour--or an up-pour, rather. It got the proportions of a
cloudburst--or, perhaps it should be said, an earthburst. The hillocks
and hummocks had forests of small fountains. In the low places pools
were forming, and these boiled with muddy foam as myriads of miniature
geysers spurted up from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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