His speech ended in a yell of fright as a monstrous red tongue was thrust before his eyes; it passed moistly over his face, it rolled oozily behind his ear; then he heard a “moo” that was as loud as muffled thunder, but affectionate and kind. The surveyor wiped his face and his spectacles and turned fearfully to see Babe, the ox whose hair was blue as the sky, gazing at him, with a pleading tenderness in his bulging eyes. “Even Babe wants you to come with us,” said Paul Bunyan, his beard shaking in a chuckle. “Such a powerful argument. Now what in thunderation----” John Rogers Inkslinger had let out a scream of horror that sent Babe galloping back through the timber. “My instruments!” cried he. “Your infernal clumsy ox has trampled them and demolished every one. What misfortune!” He jumped to his feet and began looking for his books and papers. “Gone!” raged the surveyor. “That blue devil has eaten them! All of my records, the history of my works--gone! gone! gone! Eaten by an ox! His four stomachs are crammed with them! Gone! gone! gone!” “Stop that caterwauling,” said Paul Bunyan impatiently. “When my ledgers were ruined, I simply observed, ‘There is no use crying over spilled ink.’ The hero is even more heroic in disaster than in triumph. Be true to your pretensions.” “Pretensions, the devil!” said John Rogers Inkslinger peevishly. “If you had the true figurer’s soul you would give me your sympathy instead of unconsoling platitudes.” Then the tears began to fall from his eyes and made great splashes in the river. Paul Bunyan, saying no more, grasped his arm and marched him toward the camp. The two heroes walked silently until they were out of the timber and had started over the country where Pine Orchard had stood. Then Paul Bunyan said conversationally, “I found a very original forest here. But it offered splendid logging.... Thunderation again! What ails you anyway?” For John Rogers Inkslinger had once more burst into yells of agony. “My stakes!” he cried. “My surveyor’s stakes! Two years’ work ruined, utterly ruined! The stakes that marked my section lines--you have felled them all and dragged them all to the rivers for logs! My stakes that were to have stood forever--gone! gone! gone!” He choked and gasped, he clutched wildly at nothingness, and then he fainted into the appalled logger’s arms.... That winter was the only period of his career in which Paul Bunyan knew the affliction of a guilty conscience. It was true that he had not injured the great surveyor willfully, but the fact that he had destroyed another man’s work could not be ignored. He had done irreparable damage and for the peace of his soul he must somehow make amends, devise consolations and give heart balm and recompense. He only asked that the surveyor make any demand of him, that he give him any opportunity to do a service that would make up for the loss.