Day had broken, and the driving white gorged the Yukon from shore to shore.  What of the pressure of pent water behind, the speed of the flood had become dizzying.  Down all its length the bank was being gashed and gouged, and the island was jarring and shaking to its foundations.

“Oh, great!  Great!” Frona sprang up and down between the men.  “Where is your fake, baron?”

“Ah!” He shook his head.  “Ah!  I was wrong.  I am miserable.  But the magnificence!  Look!”

He pointed down to the bunch of islands which obstructed the bend.  There the mile-wide stream divided and subdivided again,—­which was well for water, but not so well for packed ice.  The islands drove their wedged heads into the frozen flood and tossed the cakes high into the air.  But cake pressed upon cake and shelved out of the water, out and up, sliding and grinding and climbing, and still more cakes from behind, till hillocks and mountains of ice upreared and crashed among the trees.

“A likely place for a jam,” Jacob Welse said.  “Get the glasses, Frona.”  He gazed through them long and steadily.  “It’s growing, spreading out.  A cake at the right time and the right place . . .”

“But the river is falling!” Frona cried.

The ice had dropped six feet below the top of the bank, and the Baron Courbertin marked it with a stick.

“Our man’s still there, but he doesn’t move.”

It was clear day, and the sun was breaking forth in the north-east.  They took turn about with the glasses in gazing across the river.

“Look!  Is it not marvellous?” Courbertin pointed to the mark he had made.  The water had dropped another foot.  “Ah!  Too bad! too bad!  The jam; there will be none!”

Jacob Welse regarded him gravely.

“Ah!  There will be?” he asked, picking up hope.

Frona looked inquiringly at her father.

“Jams are not always nice,” he said, with a short laugh.  “It all depends where they take place and where you happen to be.”

“But the river!  Look!  It falls; I can see it before my eyes.”

“It is not too late.”  He swept the island-studded bend and saw the ice-mountains larger and reaching out one to the other.  “Go into the tent, Courbertin, and put on the pair of moccasins you’ll find by the stove.  Go on.  You won’t miss anything.  And you, Frona, start the fire and get the coffee under way.”

Half an hour after, though the river had fallen twenty feet, they found the ice still pounding along.

“Now the fun begins.  Here, take a squint, you hot-headed Gaul.  The left-hand channel, man.  Now she takes it!”

Courbertin saw the left-hand channel close, and then a great white barrier heave up and travel from island to island.  The ice before them slowed down and came to rest.  Then followed the instant rise of the river.  Up it came in a swift rush, as though nothing short of the sky could stop it.  As when they were first awakened, the cakes rubbed and slid inshore over the crest of the bank, the muddy water creeping in advance and marking the way.