The drive moved forward slowly.  Sometimes Billy packed up every day to set forth on one of his highly adventurous drives; again camp stayed for some time in the same place.  Bob amused himself tramping up and down the river, reviewing the operations.  Occasionally Roaring Dick, in his capacity of river boss, accompanied the young fellow.  Why, Bob could not imagine, for the alert, self-contained little riverman trudged along in almost entire silence, his keen chipmunk eyes spying restlessly on all there was to be seen.  When Bob ventured a remark or comment, he answered by a grunt or a monosyllable.  The grunt or the monosyllable was never sullen or hostile or contemptuous; merely indifferent.  Bob learned to economize speech, and so got along well with his strange companion.

By the end of the week the drive entered a cleared farm country.  The cultivation was crude and the clearing partial.  Low-wooded hills dotted with stumps of the old forest alternated with willow-grown bottom-lands and dense swamps.  The farmers lived for the most part in slab or log houses earthed against the winter cold.  Fences were of split rails laid “snake fashion.”  Ploughing had to be in and out between the blackened stumps on the tops of which were piled the loose rocks picked from the soil as the share turned them up.  Long, unimproved roads wandered over the hills, following roughly the section lines, but perfectly willing to turn aside through some man’s field in order to avoid a steep grade or soft going.  These things the rivermen saw from their stream exactly as a trainman would see them from his right-of-way.  The river was the highway, and rarely was it considered worth while to climb the low bluffs out of the bottom-land through which it flowed.

In the long run it landed them in a town named Twin Falls.  Here were a water-power dam and some small manufactories.  Here, too, were saloons and other temptations for rivermen.  Camp was made above town.  In the evening the men, with but few exceptions, turned in to the sleeping tent at the usual hour.  Bob was much surprised at this; but later he came to recognize it as part of a riverman’s peculiar code.  Until the drive should be down, he did not feel himself privileged to “blow off steam.”  Even the exceptions did not get so drunk they could not show up the following morning to take a share in sluicing the drive through the dam.

All but Roaring Dick.  The latter did not appear at all, and was reported “drunk a-plenty” by some one who had seen him early that morning.  Evidently the river boss did not “take this drive serious.”  His absence seemed to make no difference.  The sluicing went forward methodically.

“He’ll show up in a day or two,” said the cook with entire indifference, when Bob inquired of him.