For five years now Paul Bunyan had not visited his farm or the old home camp. He himself knew nothing of farming; first and last he was a logger, so he had left his farm completely in the control of John Shears when the great move was made from the old home camp. He trusted without doubts his boss farmer, who was a powerfully religious man. Only his violent piety had made him a failure as a woods boss. The loggers could not _bear_ to be preached to, and John Shears had insisted on preaching to them through every meal. But he managed the scissor-bills ably; they were men who had failed to make good as loggers and who had the calm and meek spirit of born farm hands. John Shears had easily taught them to venerate him as a prophet, and they willingly worked sixteen hours a day for him, though the loggers had never worked more than twelve. After Paul Bunyan’s departure, John Shears had faithfully improved the farm, and at last it became so productive that even the endless freight teams of Shagline Bill could not move all its hay and produce to the far-away logging enterprises. Then only the simple routine of farm work remained to be done, and this hardly fetched fourteen hours of labor a day from the scissor-bills, even in the harvesting season. John Shears, always a terror for work, got dissatisfied. He began to dream of strange, tempting projects of irrigation and land-clearing. He let himself imagine Paul Bunyan’s logging crews digging ditches, grubbing out stumps, and leveling hills into grand hay and grain fields. Then his dream became an active idea. If logging could somehow be prohibited, abolished, totally exterminated--what then? The loggers would all have to turn farm hands, for farming would be the only remaining industry. And then he, John Shears, the one and only master farmer, would become supreme over all of them; he would have Paul Bunyan’s place, and the great logger would have to take a lesser rôle! Soon, waking or sleeping, the idea was always in his mind. It was the root of many plans, and at last it threw out a monstrous growth. John Shears planned nothing else than to do away with Babe, the blue ox, who skidded all of Paul Bunyan’s logs to the river landings, who was the mainspring, the central motive force, of all his logging operations. Logging without Babe could no more be imagined than rain without clouds. This plan was the source of the prodigious poison parsnip plot. Parsnips were Babe’s favorite delicacy, and John Shears was supposed to ship the parsnip crop to the logging camp each fall. But in the year in which the monstrous plot was hatched he did not dig the parsnips at all. He allowed them to go to seed instead, and now the parsnip patch was rank with a poisonous second growth. John Shears intended to dig them in another month and ship them to the camp. The blue ox would eat them and die, and then he, the boss farmer, should attain the power and triumph of his dreams.