"I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be
bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's
that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds'
value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it."

The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man held
his back and grumbled.

"Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his
companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer.
"Er's well-knawn in these paarts--a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up Drift
wi' Mister Chirgwin."

Billy added two wedges to those already hammered into the saw-cut, then,
with the sledge, he drove them home and finished his task. The sorrowful
strokes rang hollow and mournful over the land, sadder to Barron's ear than
fall of earth-clod on coffin-lid. And, upon the sound, a responsive shiver
and uneasy tremor ran through trunk and bough to topmost twig of the elm--a
sudden sense, as it seemed, of awful evil and ruin undreamed of, but now
imminent. Then the monster staggered and the midget struck his last blow
and removed himself and his rheumatism. Whereupon began that magnificent
descent. Slowly, with infinitely solemn sweep, the elm's vast height swung
away from its place, described a wide aerial arc, and so, with the jolting
crash and rattle of close thunder, roared headlong to the earth, casting up
a cloud of dust, plowing the grass with splintered limbs, then lying very
still. From glorious tree to battered log it sank. No man ever saw more
instant wreck and ruin fall lightning-like on a fair thing. The mass was
crushed flat and shapeless by its own vast weight, and the larger boughs,
which did not touch the earth, were snapped short off by the concussion of
their fall.