Paul Bunyan waited patiently, despite the fears and anguish that smote him when Babe looked at him with beseeching eyes. Work had been stopped in the woods, and the anxious loggers spent most of their time around the stable. The cooks, remembering Babe’s fondness for hot cakes and fried eggs, brought him tubfuls of them most delicately cooked, but he would only nibble at them politely, then turn away. Once indeed his old jestful spirit returned when the Big Swede came near him. He set his hoof on the foreman’s foot, and at the anguished “Har noo!” he seemed to smile. But what a difference there was between that shadow of merriment and the one time gay bellow that always followed the joke! Paul Bunyan and the loggers were deeply touched. Johnny Inkslinger finally announced in a scientific speech that he was prepared to examine and treat the blue ox. He was certain, above all, that this illness was not caused by indigestion, for Babe’s stomach had always seemed to be iron-clad, invulnerable. When the hay supply ran low in the wintertime Paul Bunyan would tie a pair of green goggles over Babe’s eyes and he would graze for weeks on the snow. He was fond of the wires that bound his bales of hay, and he had always eaten them without apparent injury. So Johnny Inkslinger ignored Babe’s stomachs, but every other part of him, from muzzle to tail brush, was minutely scrutinized and explored. Nothing escaped observation. Six intrepid loggers with lanterns were lowered by ropes into his throat to examine his tonsils when he stubbornly refused to say “Ah!” But no diseased condition could anywhere be discovered. Johnny Inkslinger was baffled, but he would not give up. For sixty-one hours he sat in the stable, watching every movement of the blue ox and making pages of notes about each one. And all of the time he was thinking with the full power of his scientific mind, bringing all his vast medical knowledge to the solution of his problem. Then, just as he had reached the darkest depths of hopelessness, a flashing idea saved him with its light. The idea did not spring from his science or knowledge; indeed, it seemed to be in opposition to them. It was a simple idea, simply inspired. His gaze had been fixed for some time on the hump which the blue ox had on his back. It was such a hump as all ailing animals contrive, but, unoriginal as it was, it was yet the source of an original and startling idea, that the hump in a sick animal’s back, instead of being the _result_ of the sickness, was really the _cause_ of it! Johnny Inkslinger jumped to his feet with a shout of joy. He saw in the idea, not only the salvation of Paul Bunyan’s logging enterprises, but the root of a great fame for himself as a veterinarian as well. His jubilant calls soon roused the camp.