Bob’s memory vouchsafed a confused recollection of something read sometime, somewhere.

“Hasn’t a stream been declared navigable when logs can be driven in it?” he asked.

“Are you in charge of this drive?” the lawyer asked, turning on him sharply.

“Why—­no,” confessed Bob.

“Have you anything to do with this question?”

“I don’t believe I have.”

“Then I fail to see why I should answer your questions,” said the lawyer, with finality.  “As to your question,” he went on to Larsen with equal coldness, “if you have any doubts as to Mr. Murdock’s rights in the stream, you have the recourse of a suit at law to settle that point, and to determine the damages, if any.”

Bob found himself in the street with Larsen.

“But they haven’t got no right to stop our drive dead that way,” expostulated the old man.

Bob’s temper was somewhat ruffled by his treatment at the hands of the lawyer.

“Well, they’ve done it, whether they have the right to or not,” he said shortly; “what next?”

“I guess I’ll telegraph Mr. Welton,” said Larsen.

He did so.  The two returned to camp.  The rivermen were loafing in camp awaiting Larsen’s reappearance.  The jam was as before.  Larsen walked out on the logs.  The boy, seated on the clump of piles, gave a shrill whistle.  Immediately from the little mill appeared the brown-bearded man and his two companions.  They picked their way across the jam to the piles, where they roosted, their weapons across their knees, until Larsen had returned to the other bank.

“Well, Mr. Welton ought to be up in a couple of days, if he ain’t up the main river somewheres,” said Larsen.

“Aren’t you going to do anything in the meantime?” asked Bob.

“What can I do?” countered Larsen.’

The crew had nothing to say one way or the other, but watched with a cynical amusement the progress of affairs.  They smoked, and spat, and squatted on their heels in the Indian taciturnity of their kind when for some reason they withhold their approval.  That evening, however, Bob happened to be lying at the campfire next two of the older men.  As usual, he smoked in unobtrusive silence, content to be ignored if only the men would act in their accustomed way, and not as before a stranger.

“Wait; hell!” said one of the men to the other.  “Times is certainly gone wrong!  If they had anything like an oldtime river boss in charge, they’d come the Jack Orde on this lay-out.”

Bob pricked up his ears at this mention of his father’s name.

“What’s that?” he asked.

The riverman rolled over and examined him dispassionately for a few moments.

“Jack Orde,” he deigned to explain at last, “was a riverman.  He was a good one.  He used to run the drive in the Redding country.  When he started to take out logs, he took ’em out, by God!  I’ve heard him often:  ‘Get your logs out first, and pay the damage afterward,’ says he.  He was a holy terror.  They got the state troops out after him once.  It came to be a sort of by-word.  When you generally gouge, kick and sandbag a man into bein’ real good, why we say you come the Jack Orde on him.”