They deserted the road and made their way through a fringe of thin brush to the smoke.  Bob saw two big tents, a smouldering fire surrounded by high frames on which hung a few drying clothes, a rough table, and a cooking fire over which bubbled tremendous kettles and fifty-pound lard tins suspended from a rack.  A man sat on a cracker box reading a fragment of newspaper.  A boy of sixteen squatted by the fire.

This man looked up and nodded, as Welton and his companion approached.

“Where’s the drive, doctor?” asked the lumberman.

“This is the jam camp,” replied the cook.  “The jam’s upstream a mile or so.  Rear’s back by Thompson’s somewheres.”

“Is there a jam in the river?” asked Bob with interest.  “I’d like to see it.”

“There’s a dozen a day, probably,” replied Welton; “but in this case he just means the head of the drive.  We call that the ‘jam.’”

“I suppose Darrell’s at the rear?” Welton asked the cook.

“Yep,” replied that individual, rising to peer into one of his cavernous cooking utensils.

“Who’s in charge here?”

“Larsen”

“H’m,” said Welton.  “Well,” he added to himself, “he’s slow, safe and sure, anyway.”

He led the way to one of the tents and pulled aside the flap.  The ground inside was covered by a welter of tumbled blankets and clothes.

“Nice tidy housekeeping,” he grinned at Bob.  He picked out two of the best blankets and took them outside where he hung them on a bush and beat them vigorously.

“There,” he concluded, “now they’re ours.”

“What about the fellows who had ’em before?” inquired Bob.

“They probably had about eight apiece; and if they hadn’t they can bunk together.”

Bob walked to the edge of the stream.  It was not very wide, yet at this point it carried from three to six or eight feet of water, according to the bottom.  A few logs were stranded along shore.  Two or three more floated by, the forerunners of the drive.  Bob could see where the highest water had flung debris among the bushes, and by that he knew that the stream must be already dropping from its freshet.

It was now late in the afternoon.  The sun dipped behind a cold and austere hill-line.  Against the sky showed a fringe of delicate popples, like spray frozen in the rise.  The heavens near the horizon were a cold, pale yellow of unguessed lucent depths, that shaded above into an equally cold, pale green.  Bob thrust his hands in his pockets and turned back to where the drying fire, its fuel replenished, was leaping across the gathering dusk.

Immediately after, the driving crews came tramping in from upstream.  They paid no attention to the newcomers, but dove first for the tent, then for the fire.  There they began to pull off their lower garments, and Bob saw that most of them were drenched from the waist down.  The drying racks were soon steaming with wet clothes.