Bob ate rapidly.  After breakfast Welton struck into a well-trodden foot trail that led by a circuitous route up the river bottom, over points of land, around swamps.  Occasionally it forked.  Then, Welton explained, one fork was always a short cut across a bend, while the other followed accurately the extreme bank of the river.  They took this latter and longest trail, always, in order more closely to examine the state of the drive.  As they proceeded upstream they came upon more and more logs, some floating free, more stranded gently along the banks.  After a time they encountered the first of the driving crew.  This man was standing on an extreme point, leaning on his peavy, watching the timbers float past.  Pretty soon several logs, held together by natural cohesion, floated to the bend, hesitated, swung slowly and stopped.  Other logs, following, carromed gently against them and also came to rest.

Immediately the riverman made a flying leap to the nearest.  He hit it with a splash that threw the water high to either side, immediately caught his equilibrium, and set to work with his peavy.  He seemed to know just where to bend his efforts.  Two, then three, logs, disentangled from the mass, floated away.  Finally, all moved slowly forward.  The riverman intent on his work, was swept from view.

“After he gets them to running free, he’ll come ashore,” said Welton, in answer to Bob’s query.  “Oh, just paddle ashore with his peavy.  Then he’ll come back up the trail.  This bend is liable to jam, and so we have to keep a man here.”

They walked on and on, up the trail.  Every once in a while they came upon other members of the jam crew, either watching, as was the first man, at some critical point, or working in twos and threes to keep the reluctant timbers always moving.  At one place six or eight were picking away busily at a jam that had formed bristling quite across the river.  Bob would have liked to stop to watch; but Welton’s practised eye saw nothing to it.

“They’re down to the key log, now,” he pronounced.  “They’ll have it out in a jiffy.”

Inside of two miles or so farther they left behind them the last member of the jam crew and came upon an outlying scout of the “rear.”  Then Welton began to take the shorter trails.  At the end of another half-hour the two plumped into the full activity of the rear itself.

Bob saw two crews of men, one on either bank, busily engaged in restoring to the current the logs stranded along the shore.  In some cases this merely meant pushing them afloat by means of the peavies.  Again, when the timbers had gone hard aground, they had to be rolled over and over until the deeper water caught them.  In extreme cases, when evidently the freshet water had dropped away from them, leaving them high and dry, a number of men would clamp on the jaws of their peavies and carry the logs bodily to the water.  In this active work the men were everywhere across the surface of the river.  They