Each serves its purpose well, but the beetle never has the swing and mighty force of the great heavy maple knot.

Grant Harlson bought a seasoned knot of an old woodman and shaped a maul.

He had learned the craft in youth.
The ash trees fell beneath the ax, the trunks were cut to rail lengths, and the oxen dragged logs through muck and mire and brush and bramble to the line of fence, and there the maul swung steadily in great strokes upon the iron and wooden wedges, the smell of timber newly split was in the air, and the heavy rails were lifted, and the fence began its growth.
And it was lonesome in the depths of the wood, for the black ash swale is not tenanted by many birds and squirrels as are the ridges, and only the striped woodpecker or a wandering jay fluttered about at times, or a coon might seek the pools for frogs.

Harlson had circumstance for thought.

Only the hard labor cleared his blood and brain, and helped him.
Could fortune come to him who had such a load upon his conscience?
Was not he a violator of all law, as he had learned it,--law of both God and man?
Had he an excuse at all, and what was the degree of it?
He could not endure the time when it became too dark in the wood for work, and when he drove the jaded oxen out into the field and to the barn, and it was yet too early for seeking the hay-mow, which was of clover, and there seeking sleep.