The fever of the argument coursed through his veins all that long night. Over and over again he rehearsed it in wearisome repetition until it had assumed a certain and almost invariable form. And when he had reached the end of his pleading he began it over again, until the daylight found him weary and fevered. He arose and dressed himself. He could eat no breakfast. By a tremendous effort of the will he restrained himself from going over to Ninth Street until the middle of the morning.

He entered the drawing-room to find her seated at the piano. His heart bounded, and for an instant he stood still, summoning his forces to the struggle for which he had so painfully gathered his ammunition. She did not look up as he approached until he stood almost at her shoulder. Then she turned to him and held out both her hands.

"It is no use, Jack," she said. "I care for you too much. I will marry you whenever you say."



XIX

Orde left that evening early. This was at Carroll's request. She preferred herself to inform her family of the news.

"I don't know yet how mother is going to get along," said she. "Come back to-morrow afternoon and see them all."

The next morning Orde, having at last finished and despatched the letter to his mother, drifted up the avenue and into the club. As he passed the smoking room he caught sight of Gerald seated in an armchair by the window. He entered the room and took a seat opposite the young fellow.

Gerald held out his hand silently, which the other took.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Gerald at last. "Very glad. I told you I was on your side." He hesitated, then went on gravely: "Poor Carroll is having a hard time, though. I think it's worse than she expected. It's no worse than I expected. You are to be one of the family, so I am going to give you a piece of advice. It's something, naturally, I wouldn't speak of otherwise. But Carroll is my only sister, and I want her to be happy. I think you are the man to make her so, but I want you to avoid one mistake. Fight it out right now, and never give back the ground you win."

"I feel that," replied Orde quietly.

"Mother made father resign from the army; and while he's a dear old boy, he's never done anything since. She holds me—although I see through her—possibly because I'm weak or indifferent, possibly because I have a silly idea I can make a bad situation better by hanging around. She is rapidly turning Kendrick into a sullen little prig, because he believes implicitly all the grievances against the world and the individual she pours out to him. You see, I have no illusions concerning my family. Only Carroll has held to her freedom of soul, because that's the joyous, free, sweet nature of her, bless her! For the first time she's pitted her will against mother's, and it's a bad clash."

"Your mother objected?" asked Orde.

Gerald laughed a little bitterly. "It was very bad," said he. "You've grown horns, hoofs, and a tail overnight. There's nothing too criminal to have escaped your notice. I have been forbidden to consort with you. So has the general. The battle of last night had to do with your coming to the house at all. As it is not Carroll's house, naturally she has no right to insist."

"I shall not be permitted to see her?" cried Orde.

"I did not say that. Carroll announced then quite openly that she would see you outside. I fancy that was the crux of the matter. Don't you see? The whole affair shifted ground. Carroll has offered direct disobedience. Oh, she's a bully little fighter!" he finished in admiring accents. "You can't quite realise what she's doing for your sake; she's not only fighting mother, but her own heart."

Orde found a note at the hotel, asking him to be in Washington Square at half-past two.

Carroll met him with a bright smile.

"Things aren't quite right at home," she said. "It is a great shock to poor mother at first, and she feels very strongly. Oh, it isn't you, dear; it's the notion that I can care for anybody but her. You see, she's been used to the other idea so long that I suppose it seemed a part of the universe to her. She'll get used to it after a little, but it takes time."

Orde examined her face anxiously. Two bright red spots burned on her cheeks; her eyes flashed with a nervous animation, and a faint shade had sketched itself beneath them.

"You had a hard time," he murmured, "you poor dear!"

She smiled up at him.

"We have to pay for the good things in life, don't we, dear? And they are worth it. Things will come right after a little. We must not be too impatient. Now, let's enjoy the day. The park isn't so bad, is it?"

At five o'clock Orde took her back to her doorstep, where he left her.

This went on for several days.

At the end of that time Orde could not conceal from himself that the strain was beginning to tell. Carroll's worried expression grew from day to day, while the animation that characterised her manner when freed from the restraint became more and more forced. She was as though dominated by some inner tensity, which she dared not relax even for a moment. To Orde's questionings she replied as evasively as she could, assuring him always that matters were going as well as she had expected; that mother was very difficult; that Orde must have patience, for things would surely come all right. She begged him to remain quiescent until she gave him the word; and she implored it so earnestly that Orde, though he chafed, was forced to await the turn of events. Every afternoon she met him, from two to five. The situation gave little opportunity for lovers' demonstrations. She seemed entirely absorbed by the inner stress of the struggle she was going through, so that hardly did she seem able to follow coherently even plans for the future. She appeared, however, to gain a mysterious refreshment from Orde's mere proximity; so gradually he, with that streak of almost feminine intuition which is the especial gift to lovers, came to the point of sitting quite silent with her, clasping her hand out of sight of the chance passer-by. When the time came to return, they arose and walked back to Ninth Street, still in silence. At the door they said good-bye. He kissed her quite soberly.

"I wish I could help, sweetheart," said he.

She shook her head at him.

"You do help," she replied.

From Gerald at the club, Orde sought more intimate news of what was going on. For several days, however, the young man absented himself from his usual haunts. It was only at the end of the week that Orde succeeded in finding him.

"No," Gerald answered his greeting, "I haven't been around much. I've been sticking pretty close home."

Little by little, Orde's eager questions drew out the truth of the situation. Mrs. Bishop had shut herself up in a blind and incredible obstinacy, whence she sallied with floods of complaints, tears, accusations, despairs, reproaches, vows, hysterics—all the battery of the woman misunderstood, but in which she refused to listen to a consecutive conversation. If Carroll undertook to say anything, the third word would start her mother off into one of her long and hysterical tirades. It was very wearing, and there seemed to be nothing gained from day to day. Her child had disobeyed her. And as a climax, she had assumed the impregnable position of a complete prostration, wherein she demanded the minute care of an invalid in the crisis of a disorder. She could bear no faintest ray of illumination, no lightest footfall. In a hushed twilight she lay, her eyes swathed, moaning feebly that her early dissolution at the hands of ingratitude was imminent. Thus she established a deadlock which was likely to continue indefinitely. The mere mention of the subject nearest Carroll's heart brought the feeble complaint:

"Do you want to kill me?"

The only scrap of victory to be snatched from this stricken field was the fact that Carroll insisted on going to meet her lover every afternoon. The invalid demanded every moment of her time, either for personal attendance or in fulfilment of numerous and exacting church duties. An attempt, however, to encroach thus on the afternoon hours met a stone wall of resolution on Carroll's part.

This was the situation Orde gathered from his talk with Gerald. Though he fretted under the tyranny exacted, he could see nothing which could relieve the situation save his own withdrawal. He had already long over-stayed his visit; important affairs connected with his work demanded his attention, he had the comfort of Carroll's love assured; and the lapse of time alone could be depended on to change Mrs. Bishop's attitude, a consummation on which Carroll seemed set. Although Orde felt all the lively dissatisfaction natural to a newly accepted lover who had gained slight opportunity for favours, for confidences, even for the making of plans, nevertheless he could see for the present nothing else to do.

The morning after he had reached this conclusion he again met Gerald at the gymnasium. That young man, while as imperturbable and languid in movement as ever, concealed an excitement. He explained nothing until the two, after a shower and rub-down, were clothing themselves leisurely in the empty couch-room.

"Orde," said Gerald suddenly, "I'm worried about Carroll."

Orde straightened his back and looked steadily at Gerald, but said nothing.

"Mother has commenced bothering her again. It wasn't so bad as long as she stuck to daytime, but now she's taken to prowling in a dozen times a night. I hear their voices for an hour or so at a time. I'm afraid it's beginning to wear on Carroll more than you realise."

"Thank you," said Orde briefly.

That afternoon with Carroll he took the affair firmly in hand.

"This thing has come to the point where it must stop," said he, "and I'm going to stop it. I have some rights in the matter of the health and comfort of the girl I love."

"What do you intend to do?" asked Carroll, frightened.

"I shall have it out with your mother," replied Orde.

"You mustn't do that," implored Carroll. "It would do absolutely no good, and would just result in a quarrel that could never be patched up."

"I don't know as I care particularly," said Orde.

"But I do. Think—she is my mother."

Orde stirred uneasily with a mental reservation as to selfishness, but said nothing.

"And think what it means to a girl to be married and go away from home finally without her parent's consent. It's the most beautiful and sacred thing in her life, and she wants it to be perfect. It's worth waiting and fighting a little for. After all, we are both young, and we have known each other such a very short time."

So she pleaded with him, bringing forward all the unanswerable arguments built by the long average experience of the world—arguments which Orde could not refute, but whose falsity to the situation he felt most keenly. He could not specify without betraying Gerald's confidence. Raging inwardly, he consented to a further armistice.

At his hotel he found a telegram. He did not open it until he had reached his own room. It was from home, urging his immediate return for the acceptance of some contracted work.

"To hell with the contracted work!" he muttered savagely, and calling a bell-boy, sent an answer very much to that effect. Then he plunged his hands into his pockets, stretched out his legs, and fell into a deep and gloomy meditation.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Come in!" he called, without turning his head.

He heard the door open and shut. After a moment he looked around. Kendrick Bishop stood watching him.

Orde lit the gas.

"Hello, Kendrick!" said he. "Sit down." The boy made no reply. Orde looked at him curiously, and saw that he was suffering from an intense excitement. His frame trembled convulsively, his lips were white, his face went red and pale by turns. Evidently he had something to say, but could not yet trust his voice. Orde sat down and waited.

"You've got to let my mother alone," he managed to say finally.

"I have done nothing to your mother, Kendrick," said Orde kindly.

"You've brought her to the point of death," asserted Keudrick violently. "You're hounding her to her grave. You're turning those she loves best against her."

Orde thought to catch the echo of quotation in these words.

"Did your mother send you to me?" he asked.

"If we had any one else worth the name of man in the family, I wouldn't have to come," said Kendrick, almost in the manner of one repeating a lesson.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Orde after a moment of thought.

"Go away," cried Kendrick. "Stop this unmanly contest against a defenceless woman."

"I cannot do that," replied Orde quietly.

Kendrick's face assumed a livid pallor, and his eyes seemed to turn black with excitement. Trembling in every limb, but without hesitation, he advanced on Orde, drew a short riding-whip from beneath his coat, and slashed the young man across the face. Orde made an involuntary movement to arise, but sank back, and looked steadily at the boy. Once again Kendrick hit; raised his arm for the third time; hesitated. His lips writhed, and then, with a sob, he cast the little whip from him and burst from the room.

Orde sat without moving, while two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought home to him, as nothing else could, the turmoil of that household.

"Poor youngster!" he concluded his reverie, and went to wash his face in hot water.

He had left Carroll that afternoon in a comparatively philosophical and hopeful frame of mind. The next day she came to him with hurried, nervous steps, her usually pale cheeks mounting danger signals of flaming red, her eyes swimming. When she greeted him she choked, and two of the tears overflowed. Quite unmindful of the nursemaids across the square, Orde put his arm comfortingly about her shoulder. She hid her face against his sleeve and began softly to cry.

Orde did not attempt as yet to draw from her the cause of this unusual agitation. A park bench stood between two dense bushes, screened from all directions save one. To this he led her. He comforted her as one comforts a child, stroking clumsily her hair, murmuring trivialities without meaning, letting her emotion relieve itself. After awhile she recovered somewhat her control of herself and sat up away from him, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief dampened into a tiny wad. But even after she had shaken her head vigorously at last, and smiled up at him rather tremulously in token that the storm was over, she would not tell him that anything definite had happened to bring on the outburst.

"I just needed you," she said, "that's all. It's just nothing but being a woman, I think. You'll get used to little things like that."

"This thing has got to quit!" said he grimly.

She said nothing, but reached up shyly and touched his face where Kendrick's whip had stung, and her eyes became very tender. A carriage rolled around Washington Arch, and, coming to a stand, discharged its single passenger on the pavement.

"Why, it's Gerald!" cried Carroll, surprised.

The young man, catching sight of them, picked his way daintily and leisurely toward them. He was, as usual, dressed with meticulous nicety, the carnation in his button-hole, the gloss on his hat and shoes, the freshness on his gloves, the correct angle on his stick. His dark, long face with its romantic moustache, and its almost effeminate soft eyes, was as unemotional and wearied as ever. As he approached, he raised his stick slightly by way of salutation.

"I have brought," said he, "a carriage, and I wish you would both do me the favour to accompany me on a short excursion."

Taking their consent for granted, he signalled the vehicle, which rapidly approached.

The three—Carroll and Orde somewhat bewildered—took their seats. During a brief drive, Gerald made conversation on different topics, apparently quite indifferent as to whether or not his companions replied. After an interval the carriage drew up opposite a brown-stone dwelling on a side street. Gerald rang the bell, and a moment later the three were ushered by a discreet and elderly maid into a little square reception-room immediately off the hall. The maid withdrew.

Gerald carefully deposited his top hat on the floor, placed in it his gloves, and leaned his stick against its brim.

"I have brought you here, among other purposes, to hear from me a little brief wisdom drawn from experience and the observation of life," he began, addressing his expectant and curious guests. "That wisdom is briefly this: there comes a time in the affairs of every household when a man must assert himself as the ruler. In all the details he may depend on the woman's judgment, experience, and knowledge, but when it comes to the big crises, where life is deflected into one channel or the other, then, unless the man does the deciding, he is lost for ever, and his happiness, and the happiness of those who depend on him. This is abstruse, but I come to the particular application shortly.

"But moments of decision are always clouded by many considerations. The decision is sure to cut across much that is expedient, much that seems to be necessary, much that is dear. Carroll remembers the case of our own father. The general would have made a name for himself in the army; his wife demanded his retirement; he retired, and his career ended. That was the moment of his decision. It is very easy to say, in view of that simple statement, that the general was weak in yielding to his wife, but a consideration of the circumstances—"

"Why do you say all this?" interrupted Orde.

Gerald raised his hand.

"Believe me, it is necessary, as you will agree when you have heard me through. Mrs. Bishop was in poor health; the general in poor financial circumstances. The doctors said the Riviera. Mrs. Bishop's parents, who were wealthy, furnished the money for her sojourn in that climate. She could not bear to be separated from her husband. A refusal to resign then, a refusal to accept the financial aid offered, would have been cast against him as a reproach—he did not love his wife enough to sacrifice his pride, his ambition, his what-you-will. Nevertheless, that was his moment of decision.

"I could multiply instances, yet it would only accumulate needless proof. My point is that in these great moments a man can afford to take into consideration only the affair itself. Never must he think of anything but the simple elements of the problem—he must ignore whose toes are trodden upon, whose feelings are hurt, whose happiness is apparently marred. For note this: if a man does fearlessly the right thing, I am convinced that in the readjustment all these conflicting interests find themselves bettered instead of injured. You want a concrete instance? I believe firmly that if the general had kept to his army life, and made his wife conform to it, after the storm had passed she would have settled down to a happy existence. I cannot prove it—I believe it."

"This may be all very true, Gerald," said Orde, "but I fail to see why you have brought us to this strange house to tell it."

"In a moment," replied Gerald. "Have patience. Believing that thoroughly, I have come in the last twenty-four hours to a decision. That this happens not to affect my own immediate fortunes does not seem to me to invalidate my philosophy."

He carefully unbuttoned his frock coat, crossed his legs, produced a paper and a package from his inside pocket, and eyed the two before him.

"I have here," he went on suddenly, "marriage papers duly made out; in this package is a plain gold ring; in the next room is waiting, by prearrangement, a very good friend of mine in the clergy. Personally I am at your disposal."

He looked at them expectantly.

"The very thing!" "Oh, no!" cried Orde and Carroll in unison.

Nevertheless, in spite of this divergence of opinion, ten minutes later the three passed through the door into the back apartment—Carroll still hesitant, Orde in triumph, Gerald as correct and unemotional as ever.

In this back room they found waiting a young clergyman conversing easily with two young girls. At the sight of Carroll, these latter rushed forward and overwhelmed her with endearments. Carroll broke into a quickly suppressed sob and clasped them close to her.

"Oh, you dears!" she cried, "I'm so glad you're here!" She flashed a grateful look in Gerald's direction, and a moment later took occasion to press his arm and whisper:

"You've thought of everything! You're the dearest brother in the world!"

Gerald received this calmly, and set about organising the ceremony. In fifteen minutes the little party separated at the front door, amid a chatter of congratulations and good wishes. Mr. and Mrs. Orde entered the cab and drove away.



XX

"Oh, it IS the best way, dear, after all!" cried Carroll, pressing close to her husband. "A few minutes ago I was all doubts and fears, but now I feel so safe and settled," she laughed happily. "It is as though I had belonged to you always, you old Rock of Gibraltar! and anything that happens now will come from the outside, and not from the inside, won't it, dear?"

"Yes, sweetheart," said Orde.

"Poor mother! I wonder how she'll take it."

"We'll soon know, anyway," replied Orde, a little grimly.

In the hallway of the Bishop house Orde kissed her.

"Be brave, sweetheart," said he, "but remember that now you're my wife."

She nodded at him gravely and disappeared.

Orde sat in the dim parlour for what seemed to be an interminable period. Occasionally the sounds of distant voices rose to his ear and died away again. The front door opened to admit some one, but Orde could not see who it was. Twice a scurrying of feet overhead seemed to indicate the bustle of excitement. The afternoon waned. A faint whiff of cooking, escaping through some carelessly open door, was borne to his nostrils. It grew dark, but the lamps remained unlighted. Finally he heard the rustle of the portieres, and turned to see the dim form of the general standing there.

"Bad business! bad business!" muttered the old man. "It's very hard on me. Perhaps you did the right thing—you must be good to her—but I cannot countenance this affair. It was most high-handed, sir!"

The portieres fell again, and he disappeared.

Finally, after another interval, Carroll returned. She went immediately to the gas-fixture, which she lit. Orde then saw that she was sobbing violently. She came to him, and for a moment hid her face against his breast. He patted her hair, waiting for her to speak. After a little she controlled herself.

"How was it?" asked Orde, then.

She shivered.

"I never knew people could be so cruel," she complained in almost a bewildered manner. "Jack, we must go to-night. She—she has ordered me out of the house, and says she never wants to see my face again." She broke down for a second. "Oh, Jack! she can't mean that. I've always been a good daughter to her. And she's very bitter against Gerald. Oh! I told her it wasn't his fault, but she won't listen. She sent for that odious Mr. Merritt—her rector, you know—and he supported her. I believe he's angry because we did not go to him. Could you believe such a thing! And she's shut herself up in her air of high virtue, and underneath it she's, oh, so angry!"

"Well, it's natural she should be upset," comforted Orde. "Don't think too much of what she does now. Later she'll get over it."

Carroll shivered again.

"You don't know, dear, and I'm not going to tell you. Why," she cried, "she told me that you and I were in a conspiracy to drive her to her grave so we could get her money!"

"She must be a little crazy," said Orde, still pacifically.

"Come, help me," said Carroll. "I must get my things."

"Can't you just pack a bag and leave the rest until tomorrow? It's about hungry time."

"She says I must take every stitch belonging to me tonight."

They packed trunks until late that night, quite alone. Gerald had departed promptly after breaking the news, probably without realising to what a pass affairs would come. A frightened servant, evidently in disobedience of orders and in fear of destruction, brought them a tray of food, which she put down on a small table and hastily fled. In a room down the hall they could hear the murmur of voices where Mrs. Bishop received spiritual consolation from her adviser. When the trunks were packed, Orde sent for a baggage waggon. Carroll went silently from place to place, saying farewell to such of her treasures as she had made up her mind to leave. Orde scribbled a note to Gerald, requesting him to pack up the miscellanies and send them to Michigan by freight. The baggage man and Orde carried the trunks downstairs. No one appeared. Carroll and Orde walked together to the hotel. Next morning an interview with Gerald confirmed them in their resolution of immediate departure.

"She is set in her opposition now, and at present she believes firmly that her influence will separate you. Such a state of mind cannot be changed in an hour."

"And you?" asked Carroll.

"Oh, I," he shrugged, "will go on as usual. I have my interests."

"I wish you would come out in our part of the country," ventured Orde.

Gerald smiled his fine smile.

"Good-bye," said he. "Going to a train is useless, and a bore to everybody."

Carroll threw herself on his neck in an access of passionate weeping.

"You WILL write and tell me of everything, won't you?" she begged.

"Of course. There now, good-bye."

Orde followed him into the hall.

"It would be quite useless to attempt another interview?" he inquired.

Gerald made a little mouth.

"I am in the same predicament as yourselves," said he, "and have since nine this morning taken up my quarters at the club. Please do not tell Carroll; it would only pain her."

At the station, just before they passed in to the train, the general appeared.

"There, there!" he fussed. "If your mother should hear of my being here, it would be a very bad business, very bad. This is very sad; but—well, good-bye, dear; and you, sir, be good to her. And write your daddy, Carroll. He'll be lonesome for you." He blew his nose very loudly and wiped his glasses. "Now, run along, run along," he hurried them. "Let us not have any scenes. Here, my dear, open this envelope when you are well started. It may help cheer the journey. Not a word!"

He hurried them through the gate, paying no heed to what they were trying to say. Then he steamed away and bustled into a cab without once looking back.

When the train had passed the Harlem River and was swaying its uneven way across the open country, Carroll opened the envelope. It contained a check for a thousand dollars.

"Dear old daddy!" she murmured. "Our only wedding present!"

"You are the capitalist of the family," said Orde. "You don't know how poor a man you've married. I haven't much more than the proverbial silver watch and bad nickel."

She reached out to press his hand in reassurance. He compared it humorously with his own.

"What a homely, knotted, tanned old thing it is by yours," said he.

"It's a strong hand," she replied soberly, "it's a dear hand." Suddenly she snatched it up and pressed it for a fleeting instant against her cheek, looking at him half ashamed.



XXI

The winter months were spent at Monrovia, where Orde and his wife lived for a time at the hotel. This was somewhat expensive, but Orde was not quite ready to decide on a home, and he developed unexpected opposition to living at Redding in the Orde homestead.

"No, I've been thinking about it," he told Grandma Orde. "A young couple should start out on their own responsibility. I know you'd be glad to have us, but I think it's better the other way. Besides, I must be at Monrovia a good deal of the time, and I want Carroll with me. She can make you a good long visit in the spring, when I have to go up river."

To this Grandma Orde, being a wise old lady, had to nod her assent, although she would much have liked her son near her.

At Monrovia, then, they took up their quarters. Carroll soon became acquainted with the life of the place. Monrovia, like most towns of its sort and size, consisted of an upper stratum of mill owners and lumber operators, possessed of considerable wealth, some cultivation, and definite social ideas; a gawky, countrified, middle estate of storekeepers, catering both to the farm and local trade and the lumber mill operatives, generally of Holland extraction, who dwelt in simple unpainted board shanties. The class first mentioned comprised a small coterie, among whom Carroll soon found two or three congenials—Edith Fuller, wife of the young cashier in the bank; Valerie Cathcart, whose husband had been killed in the Civil War; Clara Taylor, wife of the leading young lawyer of the village; and, strangely enough, Mina Heinzman, the sixteen-year-old daughter of old Heinzman, the lumberman. Nothing was more indicative of the absolute divorce of business and social life than the unbroken evenness of Carroll's friendship for the younger girl. Though later the old German and Orde locked in serious struggle on the river, they continued to meet socially quite as usual; and the daughter of one and the wife of the other never suspected anything out of the ordinary. This impersonality of struggle has always been characteristic of the pioneer business man's good-nature.

Newmark received the news of his partner's sudden marriage without evincing any surprise, but with a sardonic gleam in one corner of his eye. He called promptly, conversed politely for a half hour, and then took his leave.

"How do you like him?" asked Orde, when he had gone.

"He looks like a very shrewd man," replied Carroll, picking her words for fear of saying the wrong thing.

Orde laughed.

"You don't like him," he stated.

"I don't dislike him," said Carroll. "I've not a thing against him. But we could never be in the slightest degree sympathetic. He and I don't—don't—"

"Don't jibe," Orde finished for her. "I didn't much think you would. Joe never was much of a society bug." It was on the tip of Carroll's tongue to reply that "society bugs" were not the only sort she could appreciate, but she refrained. She had begun to realise the extent of her influence over her husband's opinion.

Newmark did not live at the hotel. Early in the fall he had rented a small one-story house situated just off Main Street, set well back from the sidewalk among clumps of oleanders. Into this he retired as a snail into its shell. At first he took his meals at the hotel, but later he imported an impassive, secretive man-servant, who took charge of him completely. Neither master nor man made any friends, and in fact rebuffed all advances. One Sunday, Carroll and Orde, out for a walk, passed this quaint little place, with its picket fence.

"Let's go in and return Joe's call," suggested Orde.

Their knock at the door brought the calm valet.

"Mr. Newmark is h'out, sir," said he. "Yes, sir, I'll tell him that you called."

They turned away. As they sauntered down the little brick-laid walk, Carroll suddenly pressed close to her husband's arm.

"Jack," she begged, "I want a little house like that, for our very own."

"We can't afford it, sweetheart."

"Not to own," she explained, "just to rent. It will be next best to having a home of our own."

"We'd have to have a girl, dear," said Orde, "and we can't even afford that, yet."

"A girl!" cried Carroll indignantly. "For us two!"

"You couldn't do the housework and the cooking," said Orde. "You've never done such a thing in your life, and I won't have my little girl slaving."

"It won't be slaving, it will be fun—just like play-housekeeping," protested Carroll. "And I've got to learn some time. I was brought up most absurdly, and I realise it now."

"We'll see," said Orde vaguely.

The subject was dropped for the time being. Later Carroll brought it up again. She was armed with several sheets of hotel stationery, covered with figures showing how much cheaper it would be to keep house than to board.

"You certainly make out a strong case—on paper," laughed Orde. "If you buy a rooster and a hen, and she raises two broods, at the end of a year you'll have twenty-six; and if they all breed—even allowing half roosters—you'll have over three hundred; and if they all breed, you'll have about thirty-five hundred; and if—"

"Stop! stop!" cried Carroll, covering her ears.

"All right," agreed Orde equably, "but that's the way it figures. Funny the earth isn't overrun with chickens, isn't it?"

She thrust her tables of figures into her desk drawer. "You're just making fun of me always," she said reproachfully.

Two days later Orde took her one block up the street to look at a tiny little house tucked on a fifty-foot lot beneath the shadow of the church.

"It's mighty little," said he. "I'll have to go out in the hall to change my collar, and we couldn't have more than two people at a time to call on us."

"It's a dear!" said she, "and I'm not so e-nor-mous myself, whatever YOU may be."

They ended by renting the little house, and Carroll took charge of it delightedly. What difficulties she overcame, and what laughable and cryable mistakes she made only those who have encountered a like situation could realise. She learned fast, however, and took a real pride in her tiny box of a home. A piano was, of course, out of the question, but the great golden harp occupied one corner, or rather one side, of the parlour. Standing thus enshrouded in its covering, it rather resembled an august and tremendous veiled deity. To Carroll's great delight, Orde used solemnly to go down on all fours and knock his forehead thrice on the floor before it when he entered the house at evening. When the very cold weather came and they had to light the base-burner stove, which Orde stoutly maintained occupied all the other half of the parlour, the harp's delicate constitution necessitated its standing in the hall. Nevertheless, Carroll had great comfort from it. While Orde was away at the office, she whispered through its mellow strings her great happiness, the dreams for her young motherhood which would come in the summer, the vague and lingering pain over the hapless but beloved ones she had left behind her in her other life. Then she arose refreshed, and went about the simple duties of her tiny domain.

The winter was severe. All the world was white. The piles of snow along the sidewalks grew until Carroll could hardly look over them. Great fierce winds swept in from the lake. Sometimes Orde and his wife drove two miles to the top of the sand hills, where first they had met in this their present home, and looked out beyond the tumbled shore ice to the steel-gray, angry waters. The wind pricked their faces, and, going home, the sleigh-bells jingled, the snowballs from the horses' hoofs hit against the dash, the cold air seared the inside of their nostrils. When Orde helped Carroll from beneath the warm buffalo robes, she held up to him a face glowing with colour, framed in the soft fluffy fur of a hood.

"You darling!" he cried, and stooped to kiss her smooth, cold cheek.

When he had returned from the stable around the corner, he found the lit lamp throwing its modified light and shade over the little round table. He shook down the base-burner vigorously, thrust several billets of wood in its door, and turned to meet her eyes across the table.

"Kind of fun being married, isn't it?" said he.

"Kind of," she admitted, nodding gravely.

The business of the firm was by now about in shape. All the boom arrangements had been made; the two tugs were in the water and their machinery installed; supplies and equipments were stored away; the foremen of the crews engaged, and the crews themselves pretty well picked out. Only there needed to build the wanigan, and to cart in the supplies for the upper river works before the spring break-up and the almost complete disappearance of the roads. Therefore, Orde had the good fortune of unusual leisure to enjoy these first months with his bride. They entered together the Unexplored Country, and found it more wonderful than they had dreamed. Almost before they knew it, January and February had flown.

"We must pack up, sweetheart," said Orde.

"It's only yesterday that we came," she cried regretfully.

They took the train for Redding, were installed in the gable room, explored together for three days the delights of the old-fashioned house, the spicy joys of Grandma Orde's and Amanda's cookery, the almost adoring adulation of the old folks. Then Orde packed his "turkey," assumed his woods clothes, and marched off down the street carrying his bag on his back.

"He looks like an old tramp in that rig," said Grandma Orde, closing the storm door.

"He looks like a conqueror of wildernesses!" cried Carroll, straining her eyes after his vanishing figure. Suddenly she darted after him, calling in her high, bird-like tones. He turned and came back to her. She clasped him by the shoulders, reluctant to let him go.

"Good-bye," she said at last. "You'll take better care of my sweetheart than you ever did of Jack Orde, won't you, dear?"



XXII

Orde had reconnoitred the river as a general reconnoitres his antagonist, and had made his dispositions as the general disposes of his army, his commissary, his reserves. At this point five men could keep the river clear; at that rapid it would require twenty; there a dozen would suffice for ordinary contingencies, and yet an emergency might call for thirty—those thirty must not be beyond reach. In his mind's eye he apportioned the sections of the upper river. Among the remoter wildernesses every section must have its driving camp. The crews of each, whether few or many, would be expected to keep clear and running their own "beats" on the river. As far as the rear crew should overtake these divisions, either it would absorb them or the members of them would be thrown forward beyond the lowermost beat, to take charge of a new division down stream. When the settled farm country or the little towns were reached, many of the driving camps would become unnecessary; the men could be boarded out at farms lying in their beats. A continual advance would progress toward the Lake, the drive crews passing and repassing each other like pigeons in the sown fields. Each of these sections would be in charge of a foreman, whose responsibility ceased with the delivery of the logs to the men next below. A walking boss would trudge continually the river trail, or ride the logs down stream, holding the correlation of these many units. Orde himself would drive up and down the river, overseeing the whole plan of campaign, throwing the camps forward, concentrating his forces here, spreading them elsewhere, keeping accurately in mind the entire situation so that he could say with full confidence: "Open Dam Number One for three hours at nine o'clock; Dam Number Two for two hours and a half at ten thirty," and so on down the line; sure that the flood waters thus released would arrive at the right moment, would supplement each other, and would so space themselves as to accomplish the most work with the least waste. In that one point more than in any other showed the expert. The water was his ammunition, a definite and limited quantity of it. To "get the logs out with the water" was the last word of praise to be said for the river driver. The more logs, the greater the glory.

Thus it can readily be seen, this matter was rather a campaign than a mere labour, requiring the men, the munitions, the organisation, the tactical ability, the strategy, the resourcefulness, the boldness, and the executive genius of a military commander.

To all these things, and to the distribution of supplies and implements among the various camps, Orde had attended. The wanigan for the rear crew was built. The foremen and walking boss had been picked out. Everything was in readiness. Orde was satisfied with the situation except that he found himself rather short-handed. He had counted on three hundred men for his crews, but scrape and scratch as he would, he was unable to gather over two hundred and fifty. This matter was not so serious, however, as later, when the woods camps should break up, he would be able to pick up more workmen.

"They won't be rivermen like my old crew, though," said Orde regretfully to Tom North, the walking boss. "I'd like to steal a few from some of those Muskegon outfits."

Until the logs should be well adrift, Orde had resolved to boss the rear crew himself.

As the rear was naturally the farthest up stream, Orde had taken also the contract to break the rollways belonging to Carlin, which in the season's work would be piled up on the bank. Thus he could get to work immediately at the break-up, and without waiting for some one else. The seven or eight million feet of lumber comprised in Carlin's drive would keep the men below busy until the other owners, farther down and up the tributaries, should also have put their season's cut afloat.

The ice went out early, to Orde's satisfaction. As soon as the river ran clear in its lower reaches he took his rear crew in to Carlin's rollways.

This crew was forty in number, and had been picked from the best—a hard-bitten, tough band of veterans, weather beaten, scarred in numerous fights or by the backwoods scourge of small-pox, compact, muscular, fearless, loyal, cynically aloof from those not of their cult, out-spoken and free to criticise—in short, men to do great things under the strong leader, and to mutiny at the end of three days under the weak. They piled off the train at Sawyer's, stamped their feet on the board platform of the station, shouldered their "turkeys," and straggled off down the tote-road. It was an eighteen-mile walk in. The ground had loosened its frost. The footing was ankle-deep in mud and snow-water.

Next morning, bright and early, the breaking of the rollways began. During the winter the logs had been hauled down ice roads to the river, where they were "banked" in piles twenty, and even thirty, feet in height. The bed of the stream itself was filled with them for a mile, save in a narrow channel left down through the middle to allow for some flow of water; the banks were piled with them, side on, ready to roll down at the urging of the men.

First of all, the entire crew set itself, by means of its peavies, to rolling the lower logs into the current, where they were rapidly borne away. As the waters were now at flood, this was a quick and easy labour. Occasionally some tiers would be stuck together by ice, in which case considerable prying and heaving was necessary in order to crack them apart. But forty men, all busily at work, soon had the river full. Orde detailed some six or eight to drop below in order that the river might run clear to the next section, where the next crew would take up the task. These men, quite simply, walked to the edges of the rollway, rolled a log apiece into the water, stepped aboard, leaned against their peavies, and were swept away by the swift current. The logs on which they stood whirled in the eddies, caromed against other timbers, slackened speed, shot away; never did the riders alter their poses of easy equilibrium. From time to time one propelled his craft ashore by hooking to and pushing against other logs. There he stood on some prominent point, leaning his chin contemplatively against the thick shaft of his peavy, watching the endless procession of the logs drifting by. Apparently he was idle, but in reality his eyes missed no shift of the ordered ranks. When a slight hitch or pause, a subtle change in the pattern of the brown carpet caught his attention, he sprang into life. Balancing his peavy across his body, he made his way by short dashes to the point of threatened congestion. There, working vigorously, swept down stream with the mass, he pulled, hauled, and heaved, forcing the heavy, reluctant timbers from the cohesion that threatened trouble later. Oblivious to his surroundings, he wrenched and pried desperately. The banks of the river drifted by. Point succeeded point, as though withdrawn up stream by some invisible manipulator. The river appeared stationary, the banks in motion. Finally he heard at his elbow the voice of the man stationed below him, who had run out from his own point.

"Hullo, Bill," he replied to this man, "you old slough hog! Tie into this this!"

"All the time!" agreed Bill cheerfully.

In a few moments the danger was averted, the logs ran free. The rivermen thereupon made their uncertain way back to shore, where they took the river trail up stream again to their respective posts.

At noon they ate lunches they had brought with them in little canvas bags, snatched before they left the rollways from a supply handy by the cook. In the meantime the main crew were squatting in the lea of the brush, devouring a hot meal which had been carried to them in wooden boxes strapped to the backs of the chore boys. Down the river and up its tributaries other crews, both in the employ of Newmark and Orde and of others, were also pausing from their cold and dangerous toil. The river, refreshed after its long winter, bent its mighty back to the great annual burden laid upon it.

By the end of the second day the logs actually in the bed of the stream had been shaken loose, and a large proportion of them had floated entirely from sight. It now became necessary to break down the rollways piled along the tops of the banks.

The evening of this day, however, Orde received a visit from Jim Denning, the foreman of the next section below, bringing with him Charlie, the cook of Daly's last year's drive. Leaving him by the larger fire, Jim Denning drew his principal one side.

"This fellow drifted in to-night two days late after a drunk, and he tells an almighty queer story," said he. "He says a crew of bad men from the Saginaw, sixty strong, have been sent in by Heinzman. He says Heinzman hired them to come over not to work, but just to fight and annoy us."

"That so?" said Orde. "Well, where are they?"

"Don't know. But he sticks by his story, and tells it pretty straight."

"Bring him over, and let's hear it," said Orde.

"Hullo, Charlie!" he greeted the cook when the latter stood before him. "What's this yarn Jim's telling me?"

"It's straight, Mr. Orde," said the cook. "There's a big crew brought in from the Saginaw Waters to do you up. They're supposed to be over here to run his drive, but really they're goin' to fight and raise hell. For why would he want sixty men to break out them little rollways of his'n up at the headwaters?"

"Is that where they've gone?" asked Orde like a flash.

"Yes, sir. And he only owns a 'forty' up there, and it ain't more'n half cut, anyway."

"I didn't know he owned any."

"Yes, sir. He bought that little Johnson piece last winter. I been workin' up there with a little two-horse crew since January. We didn't put up more'n a couple hundred thousand."

"Is he breaking out his rollways below?" Orde asked Denning.

"No, sir," struck in Charlie, "he ain't."

"How do you happen to be so wise?" inquired Orde, "Seems to me you know about as much as old man Solomon."

"Well," explained Charlie, "you see it's like this. When I got back from the woods last week, I just sort of happened into McNeill's place. I wasn't drinkin' a drop!" he cried virtuously, in answer to Orde's smile.

"Of course not," said Orde. "I was just thinking of the last time we were in there together."

"That's just it!" cried Charlie. "They was always sore at you about that. Well, I was lyin' on one of those there benches back of the 'Merican flags in the dance hall 'cause I was very sleepy, when in blew old man Heinzman and McNeill himself. I just lay low for black ducks and heard their talk. They took a look around, but didn't see no one, so they opened her up wide."

"What did you hear?" asked Orde.

"Well, McNeill he agreed to get a gang of bad ones from the Saginaw to run in on the river, and I heard Heinzman tell him to send 'em in to headwaters. And McNeill said, 'That's all right about the cash, Mr. Heinzman, but I been figgerin' on gettin' even with Orde for some myself.'"

"Is that all?" inquired Orde.

"That's about all," confessed Charlie.

"How do you know he didn't hire them to carry down his drive for him? He'd need sixty men for his lower rollways, and maybe they weren't all to go to headwaters?" asked Orde by way of testing Charlie's beliefs.

"He's payin' them four dollars a day," replied Charlie simply. "Now, who'd pay that fer just river work?"

Orde nodded at Jim Denning.

"Hold on, Charlie," said he. "Why are you giving all this away if you were working for Heinzman?"

"I'm working for you now," replied Charlie with dignity. "And, besides, you helped me out once yourself."

"I guess it's a straight tip all right," said Orde to Denning, when the cook had resumed his place by the fire.

"That's what I thought. That's why I brought him up."

"If that crew's been sent in there, it means only one thing at that end of the line," said Orde.

"Sure. They're sent up to waste out the water in the reservoir and hang this end of the drive," replied Denning.

"Correct," said Orde. "The old skunk knows his own rollways are so far down stream that he's safe, flood water or no flood water."

A pause ensued, during which the two smoked vigorously.

"What are you going to do about it?" asked Denning at last.

"What would you do?" countered Orde.

"Well," said Denning slowly, and with a certain grim joy, "I don't bet those Saginaw river-pigs are any more two-fisted than the boys on this river. I'd go up and clean 'em out."

"Won't do," negatived Orde briefly. "In the first place, as you know very well, we're short-handed now, and we can't spare the men from the work. In the second place, we'd hang up sure, then; to go up in that wilderness, fifty miles from civilisation, would mean a first-class row of too big a size to handle. Won't do!"

"Suppose you get a lawyer," suggested Denning sarcastically.

Orde laughed with great good-humour

"Where'd our water be by the time he got an injunction for us?"

He fell into a brown study, during which his pipe went out.

"Jim," he said finally, "it isn't a fair game. I don't know what to do. Delay will hang us; taking men off the work will hang us. I've just got to go tip there myself and see what can be done by talking to them."

"Talking to them!" Denning snorted. "You might as well whistle down the draught-pipe of hell! If they're just up there for a row, there'll be whisky in camp; and you can bet McNeill's got some of 'em instructed on YOUR account. They'll kill you, sure!"

"I agree with you it's risky," replied Orde. "I'm scared; I'm willing to admit it. But I don't see what else to do. Of course he's got no rights, but what the hell good does that do us after our water is gone? And Jim, my son, if we hang this drive, I'll be buried so deep I never will dig out. No; I've got to go. You can stay up here in charge of the rear until I get back. Send word by Charlie who's to boss your division while you're gone."



XXIII

Orde tramped back to Sawyer's early next morning, hitched into the light buckboard the excellent team with which later, when the drive should spread out, he would make his longest jumps, and drove to head-waters. He arrived in sight of the dam about three o'clock. At the edge of the clearing he pulled up to survey the scene.

A group of three small log-cabins marked the Johnson, and later the Heinzman, camp. From the chimneys a smoke arose. Twenty or thirty rivermen lounged about the sunny side of the largest structure. They had evidently just arrived, for some of their "turkeys" were still piled outside the door. Orde clucked to his horses, and the spidery wheels of the buckboard swung lightly over the wet hummocks of the clearing, to come to a stop opposite the men. Orde leaned forward against his knees.

"Hullo, boys!" said he cheerfully.

No one replied, though two or three nodded surlily. Orde looked them over with some interest.

They were a dirty, unkempt, unshaven, hard-looking lot, with bloodshot eyes, a flicker of the dare-devil in expression, beyond the first youth, hardened into an enduring toughness of fibre—bad men from the Saginaw, in truth, and, unless Orde was mistaken, men just off a drunk, and therefore especially dangerous; men eager to fight at the drop of the hat, or sooner, to be accommodating, and ready to employ in their assaults all the formidable and terrifying weapons of the rough-and-tumble; reckless, hard, irreverrent, blasphemous, to be gained over by no words, fair or foul; absolutely scornful of any and all institutions imposed on them by any other but the few men whom they acknowledged as their leaders. And to master these men's respect there needed either superlative strength, superlative recklessness, or superlative skill.

"Who's your boss?" asked Orde.

"The Rough Red," growled one of the men without moving.

Orde had heard of this man, of his personality and his deeds. Like Silver Jack of the Muskegon, his exploits had been celebrated in song. A big, broad-faced man, with a red beard, they had told him, with little, flickering eyes, a huge voice that bellowed through the woods in a torrent of commands and imprecations, strong as a bull, and savage as a wild beast. A hint of his quality will suffice from the many stories circulated about him. It was said that while jobbing for Morrison and Daly, in some of that firm's Saginaw Valley holdings, the Rough Red had discovered that a horse had gone lame. He called the driver of that team before him, seized an iron starting bar, and with it broke the man's leg. "Try th' lameness yourself, Barney Mallan," said he. To appeal to the charity of such a man would be utterly useless. Orde saw this point. He picked up his reins and spoke to his team.

But before the horses had taken three steps, a huge riverman had planted himself squarely in the way. The others rising, slowly surrounded the rig.

"I don't know what you're up here for," growled the man at the horses' heads, "but you wanted to see the boss, and I guess you'd better see him."

"I intend to see him," said Orde sharply. "Get out of the way and let me hitch my team."

He drove deliberately ahead, forcing the man to step aside, and stopped his horses by a stub. He tied them there and descended, to lean his back also against the log walls of the little house.

After a few moments a huge form appeared above the river bank at some forty rods' distance.

"Yonder he comes now," vouchsafed the man nearest Orde.

Orde made out the great square figure of the boss, his soft hat, his flaming red beard, his dingy mackinaw coat, his dingy black-and-white checked flannel shirt, his dingy blue trousers tucked into high socks, and, instead of driving boots, his ordinary lumberman's rubbers. As a spot of colour, he wore a flaming red knit sash, with tassels. Before he had approached near enough to be plainly distinguishable, he began to bellow at the men, commanding them, with a mighty array of oaths, to wake up and get the sluice-gate open. In a moment or so he had disappeared behind some bushes that intervened in his approach to the house. His course through them could be traced by the top of his cap, which just showed above them. In a moment he thrust through the brush and stood before Orde.

For a moment he stared at the young man, and then, with a wild Irish yell, leaped upon him. Orde, caught unawares and in an awkward position, was hardly able even to struggle against the gigantic riverman. Indeed, before he had recovered his faculties to the point of offering determined resistance, he was pinned back against the wall by his shoulders, and the Rough Red's face was within two feet of his own.

"And how are ye, ye ould darlint?" shouted the latter, with a roll of oaths.

"Why, Jimmy Bourke!" cried Orde, and burst into a laugh.

The Rough Red jerked him to his feet, delivered a bear hug that nearly crushed his ribs, and pounded him mightily on the back.

"You ould snoozer!" he bellowed. "Where the blankety blank in blank did you come from? Byes," he shouted to the men, "it's me ould boss on th' Au Sable six year back—that time, ye mind, whin we had th' ice jam! Glory be! but I'm glad to see ye!"

Orde was still laughing.

"I didn't know you'd turned into the Rough Red, Jimmy," said he. "I don't believe we were either of us old enough for whiskers then, were we?"

The Rough Red grinned.

"Thrue for ye!" said he. "And what have ye been doing all these years?"

"That's just it, Jimmy," said Orde, drawing the giant one side, out of ear-shot. "All my eggs are in one basket, and it's a mean trick of you to hire out for filthy lucre to kick that basket."

"What do ye mane?" asked the Rough Red, fixing his twinkling little eyes on Orde.

"You don't mean to tell me," countered Orde, glancing down at the other's rubber-shod feet, "that this crew has been sent up here just to break out those measly little rollways?"

"Thim?" said the Rough Red. "Thim? Hell, NO! Thim's my bodyguard. They can lick their weight in wild cats, and I'd loike well to see the gang of highbankers that infists this river thry to pry thim out. We weren't sint here to wurrk; we were sint here to foight."

"Fight? Why?" asked Orde.

"Oh, I dunno," replied the Rough Red easily. "Me boss and the blank of a blank blanked blank that's attimptin' to droive this river has some sort of a row."

"Jimmy," said Orde, "didn't you know that I am the gentleman last mentioned?"

"What!"

"I'm driving this river, and that's my dam-keeper you've got hid away somewhere here, and that's my water you're planning to waste!"

"What?" repeated the Rough Red, but in a different tone of voice.

"That's right," said Orde.

In a tone of vast astonishment, the Rough Red mentioned his probable deserts in the future life.

"Luk here, Jack," said he after a moment, "here's a crew of white-water birlers that ye can't beat nowheres. What do you want us to do? We're now gettin' four dollars a day AN' board from that murderin' ould villain, Heinzman, SO WE CAN AFFORD TO WURRK FOR YOU CHEAP."

Orde hesitated.

"Oh, please do now, darlint!" wheedled the Rough Red, his little eyes agleam with mischief. "Sind us some oakum and pitch and we'll caulk yure wanigan for ye. Or maybe some more peavies, and we'll hilp ye on yure rollways. And till us, afore ye go, how ye want this dam, and that's the way she'll be. Come, now, dear! and ain't ye short-handed now?"

Orde slapped his knee and laughed.

"This is sure one hell of a joke!" he cried.

"And ain't it now?" said the Rough Red, smiling with as much ingratiation as he was able.

"I'll take you boys on," said Orde at last, "at the usual wages—dollar and a half for the jam, three for the rear. I doubt if you'll see much of Heinzman's money when this leaks out."



XXIV

Thus Orde, by the sheer good luck that sometimes favours men engaged in large enterprises, not only frustrated a plan likely to bring failure to his interests, but filled up his crews. It may be remarked here, as well as later, that the "terrors of the Saginaw" stayed with the drive to its finish, and proved reliable and tractable in every particular. Orde scattered them judiciously, so there was no friction with the local men. The Rough Red he retained on the rear.

Here the breaking of the rollways had reached a stage more exciting both to onlooker and participant than the mere opening of the river channel. Huge stacks of logs piled sidewise to the bank lined the stream for miles. When the lowermost log on the river side was teased and pried out, the upper tiers were apt to cascade down with a roar, a crash, and a splash. The man who had done the prying had to be very quick-eyed, very cool, and very agile to avoid being buried under the tons of timber that rushed down on him. Only the most reliable men were permitted at this initial breaking down. Afterwards the crew rolled in what logs remained.

The Rough Red's enormous strength, dare-devil spirit, and nimbleness of body made him invaluable at this dangerous work. Orde, too, often took a hand in some of the more ticklish situations. In old days, before he had attained the position of responsibility that raised the value of his time beyond manual work, he had been one of the best men on the river at breaking bank rollways. A slim, graceful, handsome boy of twenty, known as "Rollway Charlie," also distinguished himself by the quickness and certainty of his work. Often the men standing near lost sight of him entirely in the spray, the confusion, the blur of the breaking rollways, until it seemed certain he must have perished. Nevertheless, always he appeared at right or left, sometimes even on a log astream, nonchalant, smiling, escaped easily from the destructive power he had loosed. Once in the stream the logs ran their appointed course, watched by the men who herded them on their way. And below, from the tributaries, from the other rollways a never-ending procession of recruits joined this great brown army on its way to the lake, until for miles and miles the river was almost a solid mass of logs.

The crews on the various beats now had their hands full to keep the logs running. The slightest check at any one point meant a jam, for there was no way of stopping the unending procession. The logs behind floated gently against the obstruction and came to rest. The brown mass thickened. As far as the eye could reach the surface of the water was concealed. And then, as the slow pressure developed from the three or four miles of logs forced against each other by the pushing of the current, the breast of the jam began to rise. Timbers up-ended, crossed, interlocked, slid one over the other, mounted higher and higher in the formidable game of jack-straws the loss of which spelled death to the players.

Immediately, and with feverish activity, the men nearest at hand attacked the work. Logs on top they tumbled and rolled into the current below. Men beneath the breast tugged and pried in search of the key logs causing all the trouble. Others "flattened out the wings," hoping to get a "draw" around the ends. As the stoppage of the drive indicated to the men up and down stream that a jam had formed, they gathered at the scene—those from above over the logs, those from below up the river trail.

Rarely, unless in case of unusual complications, did it take more than a few hours at most to break the jam. The breast of it went out with a rush. More slowly the wings sucked in. Reluctantly the mass floating on the surface for miles up stream stirred, silently moved forward. For a few minutes it was necessary to watch carefully until the flow onward steadied itself, until the congestion had spaced and ordered as before. Then the men moved back to their posts; the drive was resumed. At night the river was necessarily left to its own devices. Rivermen, with the touch of superstition inseparably connected with such affairs, believe implicitly that "logs run free at night." Certainly, though it might be expected that each morning would reveal a big jam to break, such was rarely the case. The logs had usually stopped, to be sure, but generally in so peaceful a situation as easily to be started on by a few minutes' work. Probably this was because they tended to come to rest in the slow, still reaches of the river, through which, in daytime, they would be urged by the rivermen.

Jams on the river, contrary to general belief, are of very common occurrence. Throughout the length of the drive there were probably three or four hang-ups a day. Each of these had to be broken, and in the breaking was danger. The smallest misstep, the least slowness in reading the signs of the break, the slightest lack of promptness in acting on the hint or of agility in leaping from one to the other of the plunging timbers, the faintest flicker from rigid attention to the antagonist crouching on the spring, would mean instant death to the delinquent. Thus it was literally true that each one of these men was called upon almost daily to wager his personal skill against his destruction.

In the meantime the rear was "sacking" its way as fast as possible, moving camp with the wanigan whenever necessary, working very hard and very cold and very long. In its work, however, beyond the breaking of the rollways, was little of the spectacular.

Orde, after the rear was well started, patrolled the length of the drive in his light buckboard. He had a first-class team of young horses—high-spirited, somewhat fractious, but capable on a pinch of their hundred miles in a day. He handled them well over the rough corduroys and swamp roads. From jam to rear and back again he travelled, pausing on the river banks to converse earnestly with one of the foremen, surveying the situation with the bird's-eye view of the general. At times he remained at one camp for several days watching the trend of the work. The improvements made during the preceding summer gave him the greatest satisfaction, especially the apron at the falls.

"We'd have had a dozen bad jams here before now with all these logs in the river," said he to Tim Nolan, who was in charge of that beat.

"And as it is," said Tim, "we've had but the one little wing jam."

The piers to define the channel along certain shallows also saved the rear crew much labour in the matter of stranded logs. Everything was very satisfactory. Even old man Reed held to his chastened attitude, and made no trouble. In fact, he seemed glad to turn an honest penny by boarding the small crew in charge of sluicing the logs.

No trouble was experienced until Heinzman's rollways were reached. Here Orde had, as he had promised his partner, boomed a free channel to prevent Heinzman from filling up the entire river-bed with his rollways. When the jam of the drive had descended the river as far as this, Orde found that Heinzman had not yet begun to break out. Hardly had Orde's first crew passed, however, when Heinzman's men began to break down the logs into the drive. Long before the rear had caught up, all Heinzman's drive was in the water, inextricably mingled with the sixty or eighty million feet Orde had in charge.

The situation was plain. All Heinzman now had to do was to retain a small crew, which should follow after the rear in order to sack what logs the latter should leave stranded. This amounted practically to nothing. As it was impossible in so great a mass of timbers, and in the haste of a pressing labour, to distinguish or discriminate against any single brand, Heinzman was in a fair way to get his logs sent down stream with practically no expense.

"Vell, my boy," remarked the German quite frankly to Orde as they met on the road one day, "looks like I got you dis time, eh?"

Orde laughed, also with entire good-humour.

"If you mean your logs are going down with ours, why I guess you have. But you paste this in your hat: you're going to keep awful busy, and it's going to cost you something yet to get 'em down."

To Newmark, on one of his occasional visits to the camps, Orde detailed the situation.

"It doesn't amount to much," said he, "except that it complicates matters. We'll make him scratch gravel, if we have to sit up nights and work overtime to do it. We can't injure him or leave his logs, but we can annoy him a lot."

The state of affairs was perfectly well known to the men, and the entire river entered into the spirit of the contest. The drivers kept a sharp lookout for "H" logs, and whenever possible thrust them aside into eddies and backwaters. This, of course, merely made work for the sackers Heinzman had left above the rear. Soon they were in charge of a very fair little drive of their own. Their lot was not enviable. Indeed, only the pressure of work prevented some of the more aggressive of Orde's rear—among whom could be numbered the Rough Red—from going back and "cleaning out" this impertinent band of hangers-on. One day two of the latter, conducting the jam of the miniature drive astern, came within reach of the Rough Red. The latter had lingered in hopes of rescuing his peavy, which had gone overboard. To lose one's peavy is, among rivermen, the most mortifying disgrace. Consequently, the Rough Red was in a fit mood for trouble. He attacked the two single-handed. A desperate battle ensued, which lasted upward of an hour. The two rivermen punched, kicked, and battered the Rough Red in a manner to tear his clothes, deprive him to some extent of red whiskers, bloody his face, cut his shoulder, and knock loose two teeth. The Rough Red, more than the equal of either man singly, had reciprocated in kind. Orde, driving in toward the rear from a detour to avoid a swamp, heard, and descended from his buckboard. Tying his horses to trees, he made his way through the brush to the scene of conflict. So winded and wearied were the belligerents by now that he had no difficulty in separating them. He surveyed their wrecks with a sardonic half smile.

"I call this a draw," said he finally. His attitude became threatening as the two up-river men, recovering somewhat, showed ugly symptoms. "Git!" he commanded. "Scat! I guess you don't know me. I'm Jack Orde. Jimmy and I together could do a dozen of you." He menaced them until, muttering, they had turned away.

"Well, Jimmy," said he humorously, "you look as if you'd been run through a thrashing machine."

"Those fellers make me sick!" growled the Rough Red.

Orde looked him over again.

"You look sick," said he.

When the buckboard drew into camp, Orde sent Bourke away to repair damages while he called the cookee to help unpack several heavy boxes of hardware. They proved to contain about thirty small hatchets, well sharpened, and each with a leather guard. When the rear crew had come in that night, Orde distributed the hatchets.

"Boys," said he, "while you're on the work, I want you all to keep a watch-out for these "H" logs, and whenever you strike one I want you to blaze it plainly, so there won't be any mistake about it."

"What for?" asked one of the Saginaw men as he received his hatchet.

But the riverman who squatted next nudged him with his elbow.

"The less questions you ask Jack, the more answers you'll get. Just do what you're told to on this river and you'll see fun sure."

Three days later the rear crew ran into the head of the pond above Reed's dam. To every one's surprise, Orde called a halt on the work and announced a holiday.

Now, holidays are unknown on drive. Barely is time allowed for eating and sleeping. Nevertheless, all that day the men lay about in complete idleness, smoking, talking, sleeping in the warm sun. The river, silenced by the closed sluice-gates, slept also. The pond filled with logs. From above, the current, aided by a fair wind, was driving down still other logs—the forerunners of the little drive astern. At sight of these, some of the men grumbled. "We're losin' what we made," said they. "We left them logs, and sorted 'em out once already."

Orde sent a couple of axe-men to blaze the newcomers. A little before sundown he ordered the sluice-gates of the dam opened.

"Night work," said the men to one another. They knew, of course, that in sluicing logs, the gate must be open a couple of hours before the sluicing begins in order to fill the river-bed below. Logs run ahead faster than the water spreads.

Sure enough, after supper Orde suddenly appeared among them, the well-known devil of mischief dancing in his eyes and broadening his good-natured face.

"Get organised, boys," said he briskly. "We've got to get this pond all sluiced before morning, and there's enough of us here to hustle it right along."

The men took their places. Orde moved here and there, giving his directions.

"Sluice through everything but the "H" logs," he commanded. "Work them off to the left and leave them."

Twilight, then dark, fell. After a few moments the moon, then just past its full, rose behind the new-budding trees. The sluicing, under the impetus of a big crew, went rapidly.

"I bet there's mighty near a million an hour going through there," speculated Orde, watching the smooth, swift, but burdened waters of the chute.

And in this work the men distinguished easily the new white blaze-marks on Heinzman's logs; so they were able without hesitation to shunt them one side into the smoother water, as Orde had commanded.

About two o'clock the last log shot through.

"Now, boys," said Orde, "tear out the booms."

The chute to the dam was approached, as has been earlier explained, by two rows of booms arranged in a V, or funnel, the apex of which emptied into the sluice-way, and the wide, projecting arms of which embraced the width of the stream. The logs, floating down the pond, were thus concentrated toward the sluice. Also, the rivermen, walking back and forth the length of the booms, were able easily to keep the drive moving.

Now, however, Orde unchained these boom logs. The men pushed them ashore. There as many as could find room on either side the boom-poles clamped in their peavies, and, using these implements as handles, carried the booms some distance back into the woods. Then everybody tramped back and forth, round and about, to confuse the trail. Orde was like a mischievous boy at a school prank. When the last timber had been concealed, he lifted up his deep voice in a roar of joy, in which the crew joined.

"Now let's turn in for a little sleep," said be.

This situation, perhaps a little cloudy in the reader's mind, would have cleared could he have looked out over the dam pond the following morning. The blazed logs belonging to Heinzman, drifting slowly, had sucked down into the corner toward the power canal where, caught against the grating, they had jammed. These logs would have to be floated singly, and pushed one by one against the current across the pond and into the influence of the sluice-gate. Some of them would be hard to come at.

"I guess that will keep them busy for a day or two," commented Orde, as he followed the rear down to where it was sacking below the dam.

This, as Orde had said, would be sufficiently annoying to Heinzman, but would have little real effect on the main issue, which was that the German was getting down his logs with a crew of less than a dozen men. Nevertheless, Orde, in a vast spirit of fun, took delight in inventing and executing practical jokes of the general sort just described. For instance, at one spot where he had boomed the deeper channel from the rocks on either side, he shunted as many of Heinzman's logs as came by handily through an opening he had made in the booms. There they grounded on the shallows—more work for the men following. Many of the logs in charge of the latter, however, catching the free current, overtook the rear, so that the number of the "H" logs in the drive was not materially diminished.

At first, as has been hinted, these various tactics had little effect. One day, however, the chore boy, who had been over to Spruce Rapids after mail, reported that an additional crew of twenty had been sent in to Heinzman's drive. This was gratifying.

"We're making him scratch gravel, boys, anyway," said Orde.

The men entered into the spirit of the thing. In fact, their enthusiasm was almost too exuberant. Orde had constantly to negative new and ingenious schemes.

"No, boys," said he, "I want to keep on the right side of the law. We may need it later."

Meanwhile the entire length of the river was busy and excited. Heinzman's logs were all blazed inside a week. The men passed the hatchets along the line, and slim chance did a marked log have of rescue once the poor thing fell into difficulties. With the strange and interesting tendency rivermen and woodsmen have of personifying the elements of their daily work, the men addressed the helpless timbers in tones of contempt.

"Thought you'd ride that rock, you —— —— ——," said they, "and got left, did you? Well, lie there and be —— to you!"

And if chance offered, and time was not pressing, the riverman would give his helpless victim a jerk or so into a more difficult position. Times of rising water—when the sluice-gates above had been opened—were the most prolific of opportunities. Logs rarely jam on rising water, for the simple reason that constantly the surface area of the river is increasing, thus tending to separate the logs. On the other hand, falling water, tending to crowd the drive closer together, is especially prolific of trouble. Therefore, on flood water the watchers scattered along the stretches of the river had little to do—save strand Heinzman's logs for him. And when flood water had passed, some of those logs were certainly high and dry.

Up to a certain point this was all very well. Orde took pains not to countenance it officially, and caused word to be passed about, that while he did not expect his men to help drive Heinzman's logs, they must not go out of their way to strand them.

"If things get too bad, he'll have spies down here to collect evidence on us," said Orde, "and he'll jug some of us for interference with his property. We don't own the river."

"How about them booms?" asked the Rough Red.

"I did own them," explained Orde, "and I had a right to take them up when I had finished with them."

This hint was enough. The men did not cease from a labour that tickled them mightily, but they adopted a code of signals. Strangers were not uncommon. Spectators came out often from the little towns and from the farms round-about. When one of these appeared the riverman nearest raised a long falsetto cry. This was taken up by his next neighbour and passed on. In a few minutes all that section of the drive knew that it would be wise to "lie low." And inside of two weeks Orde had the great satisfaction of learning that Heinzman was working—and working hard—a crew of fifty men.

"A pretty fair crew, even if he was taking out his whole drive," commented Orde.

The gods of luck seemed to be with the new enterprise. Although Orde had, of course, taken the utmost pains to foresee every contingency possible to guard against, nevertheless, as always when dealing with Nature's larger forces, he anticipated some of those gigantic obstacles which continually render uncertain wilderness work. Nothing of the kind happened. There formed none of the tremendous white-water jams that pile up several million feet of logs, tax every resource of men, horses, and explosives, and require a week or so to break. No men were killed, and only two injured. No unexpected floods swept away works on which the drive depended. The water held out to carry the last stick of timber over the shallowest rapids. Weather conditions were phenomenal—and perfect. All up and down the river the work went with that vim and dash that is in itself an assurance of success. The Heinzman affair, which under auspices of evil augury might have become a serious menace to the success of the young undertaking, now served merely to add a spice of humour to the situation. Among the men gained currency a half-affectionate belief in "Orde's luck."

After this happy fashion the drive went, until at last it entered the broad, deep, and navigable stretches of the river from Redding to the lake. Here, barring the accident of an extraordinary flood, the troubles were over. On the broad, placid bosom of the stream the logs would float. A crew, following, would do the easy work of sacking what logs would strand or eddy in the lazy current; would roll into the faster waters the component parts of what were by courtesy called jams, but which were in reality pile-ups of a few hundred logs on sand bars mid-stream; and in the growing tepid warmth of summer would tramp pleasantly along the river trail. Of course, a dry year would make necessary a larger crew and more labour; of course, a big flood might sweep the logs past all defences into the lake for an irretrievable loss. But such floods come once in a century, and even the dryest of dry years could not now hang the drive. As Orde sat in his buckboard, ready to go into town for a first glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown and glacier-like as though the logs that covered it were viscid and composed all its substance. The enterprise was practically assured of success.

For a while now Orde was to have a breathing spell. A large number of men were here laid off. The remainder, under the direction of Jim Denning, would require little or no actual supervision. Until the jam should have reached the distributing booms above Monrovia, the affair was very simple. Before he left, however, he called Denning to him.

"Jim," said he, "I'll be down to see you through the sluiceways at Redding, of course. But now that you have a good, still stretch of river, I want you to have the boys let up on sacking out those "H" logs. And I want you to include in our drive all the Heinzman logs from above you possibly can. If you can fix it, let their drive drift down into ours.

"Then we'll have to drive their logs for them," objected Denning.

"Sure," rejoined Orde, "but it's easy driving; and if that crew of his hasn't much to do, perhaps he'll lay most of them off here at Redding."

Denning looked at his principal for a moment, then a slow grin overspread his face. Without comment he turned back to camp, and Orde took up his reins.



XXV

"Oh, I'm so GLAD to get you back!" cried Carroll over and over again, as she clung to him. "I don't live while you're away. And every drop of rain that patters on the roof chills my heart, because I think of it as chilling you; and every creak of this old house at night brings me up broad awake, because I hear in it the crash of those cruel great timbers. Oh, oh, OH! I'm so glad to get you! You're the light of my life; you're my whole life itself!"—she smiled at him from her perch on his knee—"I'm silly, am I not?" she said. "Dear heart, don't leave me again."

"I've got to support an extravagant wife, you know," Orde reminded her gravely.

"I know, of course," she breathed, bending lightly to him. "You have your work in the world to do, and I would not have it otherwise. It is great work—wonderful work—I've been asking questions."

Orde laughed.

"It's work, just like any other. And it's hard work," said he.

She shook her head at him slowly, a mysterious smile on her lips. Without explaining her thought, she slipped from his knee and glided across to the tall golden harp, which had been brought from Monrovia. The light and diaphanous silk of her loose peignoir floated about her, defining the maturing grace of her figure. Abruptly she struck a great crashing chord.

Then, with an abandon of ecstasy she plunged into one of those wild and sea-blown saga-like rhapsodies of the Hungarians, full of the wind in rigging, the storm in the pines, of shrieking, vast forces hurtling unchained through a resounding and infinite space, as though deep down in primeval nature the powers of the world had been loosed. Back and forth, here and there, erratic and swift and sudden as lightning the theme played breathless. It fell.

"What is that?" gasped Orde, surprised to find himself tense, his blood rioting, his soul stirred.

She ran to him to hide her face in his neck.

"Oh, it's you, you, you!" she cried.

He held her to him closely until her excitement had died.

"Do you think it is good to get quite so nervous, sweetheart?" he asked gently, then. "Remember—"

"Oh, I do, I do!" she broke in earnestly. "Every moment of my waking and sleeping hours I remember him. Always I keep his little soul before me as a light on a shrine. But to-night—oh! to-night I could laugh and shout aloud like the people in the Bible, with clapping of hands." She snuggled herself close to Orde with a little murmur of happiness. "I think of all the beautiful things," she whispered, "and of the noble things, and of the great things. He is going to be sturdy, like his father; a wonderful boy, a boy all of fire—"

"Like his mother," said Orde.

She smiled up at him. "I want him just like you, dear," she pleaded.



XXVI

Three days later the jam of the drive reached the dam at Redding. Orde took Carroll downtown in the buckboard. There a seat by the dam-watcher's little house was given her, back of the brick factory buildings next the power canal, whence for hours she watched the slow onward movement of the sullen brown timbers, the smooth, polished-steel rush of the waters through the chute, the graceful certain movements of the rivermen. Some of the latter were brought up by Orde and introduced. They were very awkward, and somewhat embarrassed, but they all looked her straight in the eye, and Carroll felt somehow that back of their diffidence they were quite dispassionately appraising her. After a few gracious speeches on her part and monosyllabic responses on theirs, they blundered away. In spite of the scant communication, these interviews left something of a friendly feeling on both sides.

"I like your Jim Denning," she told Orde; "he's a nice, clean-cut fellow. And Mr. Bourke," she laughed. "Isn't he funny with his fierce red beard and his little eyes? But he simply adores you."

Orde laughed at the idea of the Rough Red's adoring anybody.

"It's so," she insisted, "and I like him for it—only I wish he were a little cleaner."

She thought the feats of "log-riding" little less than wonderful, and you may be sure the knowledge of her presence did not discourage spectacular display. Finally, Johnny Challan, uttering a loud whoop, leaped aboard a log and went through the chute standing bolt upright. By a marvel of agility, he kept his balance through the white-water below, and emerged finally into the lower waters still proudly upright, and dry above the knees.

Carroll had arisen, the better to see.

"Why," she cried aloud, "it's marvellous! Circus riding is nothing to it!"

"No, ma'am," replied a gigantic riverman who was working near at hand, "that ain't nothin'. Ordinary, however, we travel that way on the river. At night we have the cookee pass us out each a goose-ha'r piller, and lay down for the night."

Carroll looked at him in reproof. He grinned slowly.

"Don't git worried about me, ma'am," said he, "I'm hopeless. For twenty year now I been wearin' crape on my hat in memory of my departed virtues."

After the rear had dropped down river from Redding, Carroll and Orde returned to their deserted little box of a house at Monrovia.

Orde breathed deep of a new satisfaction in walking again the streets of this little sandy, sawdust-paved, shantyfied town, with its yellow hills and its wide blue river and its glimpse of the lake far in the offing. It had never meant anything to him before. Now he enjoyed every brick and board of it; he trod the broken, aromatic shingles of the roadway with pleasure; he tramped up the broad stairs and down the dark hall of the block with anticipation; he breathed the compounded office odour of ledgers, cocoa matting, and old cigar smoke in a long, reminiscent whiff; he took his seat at his roll-top desk, enchanted to be again in these homely though familiar surroundings.

"Hanged if I know what's struck me," he mused. "Never experienced any remarkable joy before in getting back to this sort of truck."

Then, with a warm glow at the heart, the realisation was brought to him. This was home, and over yonder, under the shadow of the heaven-pointing spire, a slip of a girl was waiting for him.

He tried to tell her this when next he saw her.

"I felt that I ought to make you a little shrine, and burn candles to you, the way the Catholics do—"

"To the Mater Dolorosa?" she mocked.

He looked at her dark eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at her sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he thought of what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that even yet must smoulder somewhere down in the deeps of her being.

"No," said he slowly, "not that. I think my shrine will be dedicated to Our Lady of the Joyous Soul."

The rest of the week Orde was absent up the river, superintending in a general way the latter progress of the drive, looking into the needs of the crews, arranging for supplies. The mills were all working now, busily cutting into the residue of last season's logs. Soon they would need more.

At the booms everything was in readiness to receive the jam. The long swing arm slanting across the river channel was attached to its winch which would operate it. When shut it would close the main channel and shunt into the booms the logs floating in the river. There, penned at last by the piles driven in a row and held together at the top by bolted timbers, they would lie quiet. Men armed with pike-poles would then take up the work of distribution according to the brands stamped on the ends. Each brand had its own separate "sorting pens," the lower end leading again into the open river. From these each owner's property was rafted and towed to his private booms at his mill below.

Orde spent the day before the jam appeared in constructing what he called a "boomerang."

"Invention of my own," he explained to Newmark. "Secret invention just yet. I'm going to hold up the drive in the main river until we have things bunched, then I'm going to throw a big crew down here by the swing. Heinzman anticipates, of course, that I'll run the entire drive into the booms and do all my sorting there. Naturally, if I turn his logs loose into the river as fast as I run across them, he will be able to pick them up one at a time, for he'll only get them occasionally. If I keep them until everything else is sorted, only Heinzman's logs will remain; and as we have no right to hold logs, we'll have to turn them loose through the lower sorting booms, where he can be ready to raft them. In that way he gets them all right without paying us a cent. See?"

"Yes, I see," said Newmark.

"Well," said Orde, with a laugh, "here is where I fool him. I'm going to rush the drive into the booms all at once, but I'm going to sort out Heinzman's logs at these openings near the entrance and turn them into the main channel."

"What good will that do?" asked Newmark sceptically. "He gets them sorted just the same, doesn't he?"

"The current's fairly strong," Orde pointed out, "and the river's almighty wide. When you spring seven or eight million feet on a man, all at once and unexpected, and he with no crew to handle them, he's going to keep almighty busy. And if he don't stop them this side his mill, he'll have to raft and tow them back; and if he don't stop 'em this side the lake, he may as well kiss them all good bye—except those that drift into the bayous and inlets and marshes, and other ungodly places."

"I see," said Newmark drily.

"But don't say a word anywhere," warned Orde. "Secrecy is the watchword of success with this merry little joke."

The boomerang worked like a charm. The men had been grumbling at an apparently peaceful yielding of the point at issue, and would have sacked out many of the blazed logs if Orde had not held them rigidly to it. Now their spirits flamed into joy again. The sorting went like clockwork. Orde, in personal charge, watched that through the different openings in his "boomerang" the "H" logs were shunted into the river. Shortly the channel was full of logs floating merrily away down the little blue wavelets. After a while Orde handed over his job to Tom North.

"Can't stand it any longer, boys," said he. "I've got to go down and see how the Dutchman is making it."

"Come back and tell us!" yelled one of the crew.

"You bet I will!" Orde shouted back.

He drove the team and buckboard down the marsh road to Heinzman's mill. There he found evidences of the wildest excitement. The mill had been closed down, and all the men turned in to rescue logs. Boats plied in all directions. A tug darted back and forth. Constantly the number of floating logs augmented, however. Many had already gone by.

"If you think you're busy now," said Orde to himself with a chuckle, "just wait until you begin to get LOGS."

He watched for a few moments in silence.

"What's he doing with that tug?" thought he. "O-ho! He's stringing booms across the river to hold the whole outfit."

He laughed aloud, turned his team about, and drove frantically back to the booms. Every few moments he chuckled. His eyes danced. Hardly could he wait to get there. Once at the camp, he leaped from the buckboard, with a shout to the stableman, and ran rapidly out over the booms to where the sorting of "H" logs was going merrily forward.

"He's shut down his mill," shouted Orde, "and he's got all that gang of highbankers out, and every old rum-blossom in Monrovia, and I bet if you say 'logs' to him, he'd chase his tail in circles."

"Want this job?" North asked him.

"No," said Orde, suddenly fallen solemn, "haven't time. I'm going to take Marsh and the SPRITE and go to town. Old Heinzman," he added as an afterthought, "is stringing booms across the river—obstructing navigation."

He ran down the length of the whole boom to where lay the two tugs.

"Marsh," he called when still some distance away, "got up steam?"

There appeared a short, square, blue-clad man, with hard brown cheeks, a heavy bleached flaxen moustache, and eyes steady, unwavering, and as blue as the sky.

"Up in two minutes," he answered, and descended from the pilot house to shout down a low door leading from the deck into the engine room.

"Harvey," he commanded, "fire her up!"

A tall, good-natured negro reached the upper half of his body from the low door to seize an armful of the slabs piled along the narrow deck. Ten minutes later the SPRITE, a cloud of white smoke pouring from her funnel, was careening down the stretch of the river.

Captain Marsh guided his energetic charge among the logs floating in the stream with the marvellous second instinct of the expert tugboat man. A whirl of the wheel to the right, a turn to the left—the craft heeled strongly under the forcing of her powerful rudder to avoid by an arm's-length some timbers fairly flung aside by the wash. The displacement of the rapid running seemed almost to press the water above the level of the deck on either side and about ten feet from the gunwale. As the low marshes and cat-tails flew past, Orde noted with satisfaction that many of the logs, urged one side by the breeze, had found lodgment among the reeds and in the bayous and inlets. One at a time, and painfully, these would have to be salvaged.

In a short time the mills' tall smokestacks loomed in sight. The logs thickened until it was with difficulty that Captain Marsh could thread his way among them at all. Shortly Orde, standing by the wheel in the pilot-house, could see down the stretches of the river a crowd of men working antlike.

"They've got 'em stopped," commented Orde. "Look at that gang working from boats! They haven't a dozen 'cork boots' among 'em."