"You s-see," he insisted, and then he disappeared in the timber. As the travellers went on, the Migleys exhibited increasing respect for the law of gravitation. They gave their coats to the Emperor, who studiously kept as far ahead or behind them as possible to avoid conversation. He was "tongue weary," and told them so. Late in the afternoon they came to a new lumber-camp. "The Warren job" had pushed its front across the old trail. What desolation had fallen where Strong passed, two weeks before, in the shadow of the primeval wood! Its green roof lay in scraggled, withering heaps; the under thickets had been cut away; the ferns lay flat, blackening on the sunburned soil. An old skeleton of pine lifted its broken arms high above the scene of desolation, and one could hear its bones creak and rattle in the breezy heavens. Great shafts of spruce and pine were being sawed into even lengths and hauled to a skidway. Busy men looked small as ants in the edge of the high forest. Some swayed in pairs, "pulling the briar," as woodsmen say of those who work with a saw. Strong and the Migleys halted to watch the downfall of a great pine. Soon the sawyers put their wedge in the slit and smote upon it. The sheet of steel hissed back and forth. Then a few blows of the axe. The men gave a shout of warning and drew aside. The great tree began to creak and tremble. Slowly it bent and groaned; its long arms seemed to clutch at the air. Then it pitched headlong, its top whistling, its heavy stem shaking the ground upon which it fell. A voice of thunder seemed to proclaim its fate. The axemen lopped off its branches, and soon the long column lay stark, and the growth of two centuries had come to its end. Strong and his companions stood a moment longer watching the scene. "Huh!" the Emperor grunted, with a sorry look as they passed on. Near sundown they came into the cleared land--the sandy, God-forsaken barrens of Tifton, robbed of root and branch and soil, of their glory, and the one crop nature had designed for them. The travellers passed a deserted cabin on a hot, stony hill. In its door-yard they could see a plough and an old wagon partly overgrown with weeds. Some one had tried to live on the spoiled earth and had come to discouragement. Where ten thousand men could have found healing and refreshment there was not enough growing to feed a dozen sheep. Here a part of the great inheritance of man had been forever ruined. Strong spoke of the pity of it. "Can't be helped," said the elder Migley. "A man has a right to cut and sell his timber."