BULL HUNTER

CHAPTER 1

It was the big central taproot which baffled them.  They had hewed easily through the great side roots, large as branches, covered with soft brown bark; they had dug down and cut through the forest of tender small roots below; but when they had passed the main body of the stump and worked under it, they found that their hole around the trunk was not large enough in diameter to enable them to reach to the taproot and cut through it.  They could only reach it feebly with the hatchet, fraying it, but there was no chance for a free swing to sever the tough wood.  Instead of widening the hole at once, they kept laboring at the root, working the stump back and forth, as though they hoped to crystallize that stubborn taproot and snap it like a wire.  Still it held and defied them.  They laid hold of it together and tugged with a grunt; something tore beneath that effort, but the stump held, and upward progress ceased.

They stopped, too tired for profanity, and gazed down the mountainside after the manner of baffled men, who look far off from the thing that troubles them.  They could tell by the trees that it was a high altitude.  There were no cottonwoods, though the cottonwoods will follow a stream for more than a mile above sea level.  Far below them a pale mist obscured the beautiful silver spruce which had reached their upward limit.  Around the cabin marched a scattering of the balsam fir.  They were nine thousand feet above the sea, at least.  Still higher up the sallow forest of lodgepole pines began; and above these, beyond the timberline, rose the bald summit itself.

They were big men, framed for such a country, defying the roughness with a roughness of their own—­these stalwart sons of old Bill Campbell.  Both Harry and Joe Campbell were fully six feet tall, with mighty bones and sinews and work-toughened muscles to justify their stature.  Behind them stood their home, a shack better suited for the housing of cattle than of men.  But such leather-skinned men as these were more tender to their horses than to themselves.  They slept and ate in the shack, but they lived in the wind and the sun.

Although they had looked down the stern slopes to the lower Rockies, they did not see the girl who followed the loosely winding trail.  She was partly sheltered by the firs and came out just above them.  They began moiling at the stump again, sweating, cursing, and the girl halted her horse near by.  The profanity did not distress her.  She was so accustomed to it that the words had lost all edge and point for her; but her freckled face stirred to a smile of pleasure at the sight of their strength, as they alternately smote at the taproot and then strove in creaking, grunting unison to work it loose.

They remained so long oblivious of her presence that at length she called, “Why don’t you dig a bigger hole, boys?”