The Man From The Bitter Roots

Bruce had a favorite bush, thick, and a safe distance from the work, behind which it was his wont to retire at such times as the sight of Jennings puttering while the crew under him stood idle, became too much for Bruce's nerves: "He'd break the Bank of England!" Bruce would exclaim in a vehement whisper behind the bush. "If he'd been on the pay-roll of Rameses II, they'd have dug up his work intact. It's fierce! As sure as shooting I'm going to run out of money."

Yet so long as Jennings was in charge, Bruce would not listen to attacks upon him behind his back, and Jennings had succeeded in antagonizing almost all the crew. With the same regularity that the sun rose he and Woods, the carpenter, had their daily set-to, if over nothing more important than the mislaying of a file or saw--no doubt they were at it now.

Bruce sighed. It seemed eons ago that he had had time to watch the kingfisher flying to his nest or the water-ousel ducking and teetering sociably at his feet. They never came any more, neither they nor the black bear to his service-berry bush and Old Felix had learned in one bitter lesson how his confidence in man had been misplaced. Nothing came any more but annoyances, trouble, and thinking of trouble. Bruce wondered what was the matter with Toy. He had looked as grim and forbidding at breakfast as a Chinese god of war.

But it was no time to speculate, with a load of lumber grinding into his sore shoulder, so Bruce hurried on across the slippery foot-log and up a steep pitch to see the carpenter charging through the brush brandishing a saw as if it was a sabre.

"I want my 'time,'" he shouted when he saw Bruce. "Him or me has got to quit. I won't work with that feller--I won't take orders from the likes o' him! I never saw a man from Oregon yit that was worth the powder to blow him up! Half-baked, no-account fakirs, the whole lot of 'em--allus a hirin' for somethin' they cain't do! Middle West renegades! Poor white trash! Oregon is the New Jersey of the Pacific coast; it's the Missoury of the West. It ought to be throwed into some other state and its name wiped off the map. That there Jennings has got the ear-marks of Oregon printed on him like a governmint stamp. Every time I see that putterin' web-foot's tracks in the dust it makes me hot. He don't know how to put up this plant no mor'n I do and you'll find it out. If an Oregonian'd be offered a job teachin' dead languages in a college he'd make a bluff at doin' it if he couldn't write his own name. Why them 'web-feet'--"