head of the jam the men worked like demons.  Wherever the timbers caught or hesitated for a moment in their slow crushing forward, there a dozen men leaped savagely, to jerk, heave and pry with their heavy peavies.  Continually under them the footing shifted; sullen logs menaced them with crushing or complete engulfment in their grinding mill.  Seemingly they paid no attention to this, but gave all their energies to the work.  In reality, whether from calculation or merely from the instinct that grows out of long experience, they must have pre-estimated every chance.

“What bully team work!” cried Bob, stirred to enthusiasm.

Now the motion quickened.  The centre of the river rushed forward; the wings sucked in after from either side.  A roar and battling of timbers, jets of spray, the smoke of waters filled the air.  Quite coolly the rivermen made their way ashore, their peavies held like balancing poles across their bodies.  Under their feet the logs heaved, sank, ground together, tossed above the hurrying under-mass, tumultuous as a close-packed drove of wild horses.  The rivermen rode them easily.  For an appreciable time one man perched on a stable timber watching keenly ahead.  Then quite coolly he leaped, made a dozen rapid zigzag steps forward, and stopped.  The log he had quitted dropped sullenly from sight, and two closed, grinding, where it had been.  In twenty seconds every man was safely ashore.

The river caught its speed.  Hurried on by the pressure of water long dammed back, the logs tumbled forward.  Rank after rank they swept past, while the rivermen, leaning on the shafts of their peavies, passed them in review.

“That was luck,” Welton’s voice broke in on Bob’s contemplation.  “It’s just getting dark.  Couldn’t have done it without the dynamite.  It splinters up a little timber, but we save money, even at that.”

“Billy doesn’t carry that with the other supplies, does he?” asked Bob.

“Sure,” said Welton; “rolls it up in the bedding, or something.  Well, John Harvey, Junior,” said he to that youth, “what do you think of it?  A little different driving this white water than pushing logs with a pike pole down a slack-water river like the Green, hey?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy nodded out of his Indian stolidity.

“You see now why a man has to start young to be a riverman,” Welton told Bob, as they bent their steps toward camp.  “Poor little John Harvey out on that jam when she broke would have stood about as much chance as a beetle at a woodpecker prayer meeting.”

XV

Two days later Welton returned to the mill.  At his suggestion Bob stayed with the drive.  He took his place quietly as a visitor, had the good sense to be unobtrusive, and so was tolerated by the men.  That is to say, he sat at the camp fires practically unnoticed, and the rivermen talked as though he were not there.  When he addressed any of them they answered him with entire good humour, but ordinarily they paid no more attention to him than they did to the trees and bushes that chanced to surround the camp.