All this took time, vastly more time than it takes in the telling.  The logs were ponderous masses.  They had to be maneuvered sometimes between stumps and standing timber, jerked this way and that to bring them into the clear.  By four o’clock Benton and his rigging-slinger had just finished bunting their second batch of logs down the chute.  Stella watched these Titanic labors with a growing interest and a dawning vision of why these men walked the earth with that reckless swing of their shoulders.  For they were palpably masters in their environment.  They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low.  Amid constant dangers they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of Hercules.  Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did not always emerge victorious.

When Benton and his helper followed the haul-back line away to the domain of the falling gang the last time, Stella had so far unbent as to strike up conversation with the donkey engineer.  That greasy individual finished stoking his fire box and replied to her first comment.

“Work?  You bet,” said he.  “It’s real graft, this is.  I got the easy end of it, and mine’s no snap.  I miss a signal, big stick butts against something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man plumb in two.  You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin’ donkey.  These woods is no place for a man, anyway, if he ain’t spry both in his head and feet.”

“Do many men get hurt logging?” Stella asked.  “It looks awfully dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing everything.  Look at that.  Goodness!”

From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and broken limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar that stood in the way of its downward swoop.  They could hear the pieces strike against brush and trees like the patter of shot on a tin wall.

The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough.

“Them flyin’ chunks raise the dickens sometimes,” he observed.  “Oh, yes, now an’ then a man gets laid out.  There’s some things you got to take a chance on.  Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a limb drops on you, or you get in the way of a breakin’ line,—­though a man ain’t got any business in the bight of a line.  A man don’t stand much show when the end of a inch ‘n’ a quarter cable snaps at him like a whiplash.  I seen a feller on Howe Sound cut square in two with a cable-end once.  A broken block’s the worst, though.  That generally gets the riggin’ slinger, but a piece of it’s liable to hit anybody.  You see them big iron pulley blocks the haul-back cable works in?  Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch block to a stump an’ run the main line through it at an angle to get a log out the way you want.  Suppose the block breaks when I’m givin’ it to her?  Chunks uh that broken cast iron’ll fly like bullets.  Yes, sir, broken blocks is bad business.  Maybe you noticed the boys used the snatch block two or three times this afternoon?  We’ve been lucky in this camp all spring.  Nobody so much as nicked himself with an axe.  Breaks in the gear don’t come very often, anyway, with an outfit in first-class shape.  We got good gear an’ a good crew—­about as skookum a bunch as I ever saw in the woods.”