Not half a mile from the inlet the Coho gathers itself together for its last wild rush to salt water.  And here there is a huge pool where logs lie peacefully as alligators in the sun.  At the end of the pool the river flows gently in a channel free from rocks and snags.  Then the channel narrows, and a little farther on you behold the head of the rapid, and half-way down the Coho Falls thunder everlastingly.  When the logs reach the falls they are meat for the mills.  Nothing can stop them then.  One after another they rise on end to take the final plunge.  Some twist and writhe as if in agony, as if conscious that the river and forest shall know them no more.  Thousands have travelled the self-same way; not one has ever returned.  The lower rapid of the Coho hardly deserves its name.  Half a mile farther on it is an estuary across which stretches the boom.

The crews assembled on each side of the pool.  The logs were pricked into slow movement.  This being duffers’ work was assigned to the less experienced.  The picked river-drivers stood upon the rocks of the upper rapid, pole in hand.  And here, watching them with a lack-lustre eye, stood Mamie in the shade of a dogwood tree in full blossom.  Now and again a soft white petal would fall upon the water and be swept away.  Above the hemlocks soughed softly.  At her feet the giant maidenhair raised its delicate fronds till they touched her cheek.

She watched the logs go by in a never-ending procession.  The scene fascinated her, although, in a sense, she was singularly devoid of either imagination or perception.  Movement beguiled a woman whose own life had been stagnant for five-and-twenty years.  Deep down in her heart was the unformulated but inevitable conviction that the logs were moving and that she was standing still.  Tom loomed large in the immediate foreground.  He, too, moved so swiftly that his huge form lacked definition.  She saw him snatch a pole from one of the men and stab viciously at a log which refused to budge; and every time that his arm rose and fell a little shudder trickled down her spinal column.  The log seemed to receive the blows apathetically.  A bad jam was imminent.  She could hear Tom swearing, and the other logs floating on and on seemed to hear him also, and tremble.  His bull’s voice rose loud above the roar of the falls.  Mamie looked down.  At her feet crouched Dennis, the dog, and he also was trembling at those raucous sounds, and Mamie could feel his thin ribs pressing against her own thin legs.

At that moment light came to her obscure mind.  She was like the log.  She refused to budge, funked the plunge, submitting to unending blows, and words which were almost worse than blows.  And by her obstinacy and apathy she was driving the best man on God’s earth to premeditated murder.

That morning, let us remember, Tom had beaten the dog, and because she had interfered with a pitiful protest her husband had struck her close to the temple.  Ever since this blow she had heard the roar of the falls with increasing intensity.