ods
Appleton had made him a camp boss.

His camps varied from year to year in no slightest detail. He made no
suggestions for facilitating or systematizing the work, nor would he
listen to any. He roared mightily at the substitution of horses for
oxen; he openly scoffed at donkey engines, and would have none of them.

During his years as a sawyer, by the very brute strength and doggedness
of him, he had established new records for laying down timber. And now,
as boss, he bullied the sawyers who could not equal those records--and
hated those who could.

Arbitrary, jealous, malignant, he ruled his camps with the bluff and
bluster of the born coward.

Among the lumber-jacks, he was known and hated as a hard driver of men
and a savage fighter. In the quick, brutish fights of the camps, men
went down under the smashing blows of his huge fists as they would go
down to the swing of a derrick-boom, and, once down, would be jumped
upon with calked boots and spiked into submission.

It was told in the woods that whisky flowed unchallenged in Buck
Moncrossen's camps. His crews were known as hard crews; they "hired out
for tough hands, and it was up to them to play their string out."

At the first cry of "gillon" (stormy days when the crews cannot work)
flat flasks and round black bottles circulated freely in the
bunk-house, and the day started, before breakfast, in a wild orgy of
rough horse-play, poker, and profanity.

But woe betide the man who allowed overindulgence to interfere with the
morrow's work. Evil things were whispered of Moncrossen's man-handling
of "hold-overs."

In the office, back in Minneapolis, if these things were known they
were winked at. For Moncrossen was a boss who "got out the logs," and
the details of his discipline were unquestioned.

On the Appleton holdings along Blood River the pine stood tall and
straight and uncut.

In the years of plenty--those wasteful years of frenzied logging, when
white pine lumber brought from twelve to twenty dollars a thousand and
rival concerns were laying down only the choicest of logs--Appleton's
crews were ordered to clean up as they went.

Toothpick logging it was called then, and H. D. Appleton was
contemptuously referred to as "the toothpicker."

Twenty years later, with the market clamoring for white pine at any
price, Appleton was selling white pine, while in the denuded forest the
crews of his rivals were getting out cull timber and Norway.

And t