Bunyan, however, was not alone in his logging ventures. He had many helpers, but none of them were cast in quite such an heroic mould as was Paul himself. There were the seven axemen who helped him the winter he logged Dakota, who kept a cord of four-foot wood on the table for toothpicks, and whose singing could be heard of an evening down on the Atlantic. There was the little chore boy who turned the grindstone which was so large that every time it turned around once it was payday. There was Johnny Inkslinger, the bookkeeper, who made the first fountain pen, which held twenty-four barrels of ink, and who kept two complete sets of books, one with each hand. Brimstone Bill cared for Babe and made for him those wonderful yokes of cranberry wood, which made it possible for Babe to pull anything which had two ends to it. Big Ole, the blacksmith, had two tasks. One was to shoe Babe, and every time he did it he had to open up a new iron mine. The other was to punch the holes in the doughnuts for the cook. Another helper was Cris Crosshaul, a careless cuss, who was responsible for taking wrong logs down to New Orleans, which made it necessary for Paul to bring them back up the river. This was done by feeding Babe a large salt ration and then letting him drink out of the upper river. He drank the river dry and the logs came up stream faster than they went down. Of the other helpers it is perhaps sufficient to mention only Joe McFrau, who was able to ride anything which ever floated and in any water, and the two cooks, Sourdough Sam and Big Joe. Sourdough Sam made everything except coffee out of sourdough. When Shot Gunderson put his winter's cut of logs into Round River and then drove them around its whole course three times before he found that it did not have any outlet, Sam made up a large batch of sourdough and dumped it into the river and when it got to working it lifted the logs over the divide. But Sam was seriously injured one day when his sourdough barrel blew up and Big Joe was employed. His famous Black Duck dinner was so fine that none of the American loggers cared to eat again for five weeks; but he could only satisfy the French-Canadians by dumping a car load of split peas in a boiling lake.