Free Home Ranch by Ralph Moody Page B

and hung swaying—as if it were just waiting for someone foolish enough to walk under it.
    While I was standing there, a tall, slim tree came whistling down a little way beyond me. The slender trunk curved as it cut through between a couple of larger trees, and the top fell within a few feet of the wagon. I climbed a little way up the leaning trunk of the big tree I’d cut, and jounced up and down, but wasn’t heavy enough to shake it loose.
    After I’d jounced a few more times, I went down and began chopping the limbs off the tree Zeb had felled. By the time I’d finished, he had a couple of others, just like it, stretched out with their tops lying close to the wagon. He hadn’t said a word, but when I stopped for breath, I could hear him making some kind of a noise as he chopped. It sounded like a string of slow grunts, connected by high-pitched whispers. When I listened real sharply I could hear that he was singing, “
She WORE a yella RIBbon aROUND her NECK. She WORE a yella RIBbon aROUND her NECK.
” He was grunting every other sound as the axe came down, and with every slow stroke a chip, nearly as big as my head, flew.
    I didn’t stop for breath any oftener than I had to, and Zeb didn’t hurry a bit, but he had a couple of dozen trees felled before I had six limbed out. Every one of them was just the right size for fence posts, and every top was within fifteen feet of the wagon. I guess he thought he was far enough ahead of me by that time. When I stopped to look up again, he was fitting his shoulder under the trunk of the tree I’d left hanging. He heaved up and against it, then jumped back, as quick as a cat, and the tree came crashing down.
    I kept my axe swinging, but watched Zeb. Working in his lazy, loose-jointed way, he lopped off the branches of the big tree, and topped it where it was about four inches through. Measuring with his eye, he notched the trunk every seven feet as he came back down the steep hill. Then he cut half way through at each notch, rolled the log over, and finished the cuts.
    Zeb was beginning his last cut when I stopped for a breather. When I looked up again he was nowhere in sight. I’d limbed out two more trees before he came back, carrying half a dozen chips of granite, each a little larger than his hands. Using them for wedges, he went to work, splitting the logs he’d cut from the big tree. Sparks flew from the granite each time the back of his axe head hit it.
    I wanted to stand and watch him, but was ashamed to, and half afraid he’d say something rough to me for being fool enough to cut so big a tree. I was chopping limbs as fast as I could go when he came walking down the hill past me. He carried two of the quartered sections of the biggest log, and each of them must have weighed nearly double what I did. He shouldered them squarely across the wagon, spit a thin streak of tobacco juice, and said, “Make right nice corner posts, them will. Ain’t it time we et?”
    Through the early afternoon, Zeb kept going in that lazy, loose-jointed way of his, but it made the sweat run down my back to limb trees as fast as he felled, cut them into post lengths, and carried them to the wagon. The sun was still high when we had our wagon loaded, but I hadn’t done a quarter of the work. Sid and Ned had been chopping steadily, but they still had a couple of hours’ work to do when we pulled away for the home ranch.
    I’d thought we were pretty slow in coming out that morning, but we were twice as slow going back. Once in a while Zeb would sing a few words of “
Yella Ribbon
,” half under his breath, but most of the time he just sat sprawled there on top of the posts with his eyes partly shut. And every half mile or so, he let the horses stop for a long rest.
    By the time we left the canyon floor and climbed the spur, the sun was dipping down toward the top of the high range of mountains to the west. We had just