“Too bad yer so hoarse to-night,” he would say to a bunkhouse bard who had just finished a song. “I’m thinkin’ we’re needin’ more blankets. Ol’ Paul’ll let us all freeze to death.” He would lead the bard to think he _did_ have a hoarseness, the bunkhouse gayety would vanish and a seed of resentment would be sown against the master logger. Before his pants were ruined Jonah Wiles had never found a grievance which would serve to keep his instinct of revolt always inflamed. But now his misfortune was in his mind constantly. Without openly attacking the culinary methods and creations of Sourdough Sam, he slyly made a terrible shape of them for his bunkhouse mates. “Poor ol’ Sam,” he would say, drawing his lean, gray face into an expression of pity. “Poor ol’ Sam. He cooks the best he knows how, maybe. But I’m afeard that sourdough uh his’n ’ll bring us all to an ontimely end, fin’ly.” Let a logger complain of corns, and Jonah Wiles would remark that he had never heard of corns in the woods before sourdough was invented. He insinuated that everything from ingrown nails and bunions to toothache and falling hair was due to the loggers’ sourdough meals. Ere long old Sam was met with silence and bitter looks when he visited the bunkhouses to show a new use of sourdough. And the loggers’ appetites fell away; one month after the accident to Jonah Wiles’ pants, Johnny Inkslinger joyfully reported to Paul Bunyan that the consumption of flour and soda had been cut in half. The great logger frowned; he had already learned much about the need his men had for good food rightly cooked, though it was no necessity for him. “But I can’t consider this business, now,” he said ruefully. “We’ve got to get this country logged off before the water drops in Redbottom Lake. When the spring drive is finished we’ll settle the feeding problem once and for all time.” Saying this, he thrust a bundle of sharpened axes and two score new crosscut saws into his pocket, and, followed by his timekeeper, he strode for the woods to lay out the work for the next day. Jonah Wiles was then in the kitchen with Sourdough Sam. Paul Bunyan and his timekeeper always walked softly, but the wind from their swinging feet rattled the doors and windows of the cookhouse. “There they go,” muttered Jonah Wiles. “Now listen, Sam. They’ll be in the woods for an hour anyway. Now’s yer chance to get in good with everybody again. I want yeh to keep yer high place, ol’ feller. I’ve always loved yeh like a brother, an’ yer trouble with the boys is grievin’ me to a shadder.” “I shore appreciate your sympathy when all is givin’ me the cold shoulder,” said the cook disconsolately. “But ’tain’t no use. Nobody seems willin’ to give sourdough a real chance. Folks could use it fer ever’thing if they wanted to, an’ now these fool loggers even hate to eat it.”