"TimBER!" came the cry, and then the swish-sh-sh,--CRASH of the
tree's fall.

Thorpe knew that now either Hank or Tom must be climbing with the
long measuring pole along the prostrate trunk, marking by means of
shallow ax-clips where the saw was to divide the logs. Then Tom
shouted something unintelligible. The other men seemed to understand,
however, for they dropped their work and ran hastily in the direction
of the voice. Thorpe, after a moment's indecision, did the same.
He arrived to find a group about a prostrate man. The man was Paul.

Two of the older woodsmen, kneeling, were conducting coolly a hasty
examination. At the front every man is more or less of a surgeon.

"Is he hurt badly?" asked Thorpe; "what is it?"

"He's dead," answered one of the other men soberly.

With the skill of ghastly practice some of them wove a litter on
which the body was placed. The pathetic little procession moved in
the solemn, inscrutable forest.

When the tree had fallen it had crashed through the top of another,
leaving suspended in the branches of the latter a long heavy limb.
A slight breeze dislodged it. Henry Paul was impaled as by a javelin.

This is the chief of the many perils of the woods. Like crouching
pumas the instruments of a man's destruction poise on the spring,
sometimes for days. Then swiftly, silently, the leap is made. It
is a danger unavoidable, terrible, ever-present. Thorpe was destined