"Kerlie," went on Thorpe, "your crew can break rollways with the rest until we get the river fairly filled, and then you can move on down stream as fast as you are needed.Scotty, you will have the rear.Tim and I will boss the river."At once the signal was given to Ellis, the dam watcher.Ellis and his assistants thereupon began to pry with long iron bars at the ratchets of the heavy gates.The chore-boy bent attentively over the ratchet-pin, lifting it delicately to permit another inch of raise, dropping it accurately to enable the men at the bars to seize a fresh purchase.The river's roar deepened.Through the wide sluice-ways a torrent foamed and tumbled.Immediately it spread through the brush on either side to the limits of the freshet banks, and then gathered for its leap against the uneasy rollways.Along the edge of the dark channel the face of the logs seemed to crumble away.Farther in towards the banks where the weight of timber still outbalanced the weight of the flood, the tiers grumbled and stirred, restless with the stream's calling.Far down the river, where Bryan Moloney and his crew were picking at the jam, the water in eager streamlets sought the interstices between the logs, gurgling excitedly like a mountain brook.
The jam creaked and groaned in response to the pressure.From its face a hundred jets of water spurted into the lower stream.Logs up-ended here and there, rising from the bristling surface slowly, like so many arms from lower depths.Above, the water eddied back foaming; logs shot down from the rollways, paused at the slackwater, and finally hit with a hollow and resounding BOOM! against the tail of the jam.A moment later they too up-ended, so becoming an integral part of the "chevaux de frise."The crew were working desperately.Down in the heap somewhere, two logs were crossed in such a manner as to lock the whole.They sought those logs.
Thirty feet above the bed of the river six men clamped their peaveys into the soft pine; jerking, pulling, lifting, sliding the great logs from their places.Thirty feet below, under the threatening face, six other men coolly picked out and set adrift, one by one, the timbers not inextricably imbedded.From time to time the mass creaked, settled, perhaps even moved a foot or two; but always the practiced rivermen, after a glance, bent more eagerly to their work.
Outlined against the sky, big Bryan Moloney stood directing the work.He had gone at the job on the bias of indirection, picking out a passage at either side that the center might the more easily "pull." He knew by the tenseness of the log he stood on that, behind the jam, power had gathered sufficient to push the whole tangle down-stream.Now he was offering it the chance.
Suddenly the six men below the jam scattered.Four of them, holding their peaveys across their bodies, jumped lightly from one floating log to another in the zigzag to shore.When they stepped on a small log they re-leaped immediately, leaving a swirl of foam where the little timber had sunk under them; when they encountered one larger, they hesitated for a barely perceptible instant.Thus their progression was of fascinating and graceful irregularity.The other two ran the length of their footing, and, overleaping an open of water, landed heavily and firmly on the very ends of two small floating logs.In this manner the force of the jump rushed the little timbers end-on through the water.The two men, maintaining marvellously their balance, were thus ferried to within leaping distance of the other shore.
In the meantime a barely perceptible motion was communicating itself from one particle to another through the center of the jam.
A cool and observant spectator might have imagined that the broad timber carpet was changing a little its pattern, just as the earth near the windows of an arrested railroad train seems for a moment to retrogress.The crew redoubled its exertions, clamping its peaveys here and there, apparently at random, but in reality with the most definite of purposes.A sharp crack exploded immediately underneath.There could no longer exist any doubt as to the motion, although it was as yet sluggish, glacial.Then in silence a log shifted--in silence and slowly--but with irresistible force.Jimmy Powers quietly stepped over it, just as it menaced his leg.Other logs in all directions up-ended.The jam crew were forced continually to alter their positions, riding the changing timbers bent-kneed, as a circus rider treads his four galloping horses.
Then all at once down by the face something crashed.The entire stream became alive.It hissed and roared, it shrieked, groaned and grumbled.At first slowly, then more rapidly, the very forefront of the center melted inward and forward and downward until it caught the fierce rush of the freshet and shot out from under the jam.
Far up-stream, bristling and formidable, the tons of logs, grinding savagely together, swept forward.
The six men and Bryan Moloney--who, it will be remembered, were on top--worked until the last moment.When the logs began to cave under them so rapidly that even the expert rivermen found difficulty in "staying on top," the foreman set the example of hunting safety.
"She 'pulls,' boys," he yelled.
Then in a manner wonderful to behold, through the smother of foam and spray, through the crash and yell of timbers protesting the flood's hurrying, through the leap of destruction, the drivers zigzagged calmly and surely to the shore.
All but Jimmy Powers.He poised tense and eager on the crumbling face of the jam.Almost immediately he saw what he wanted, and without pause sprang boldly and confidently ten feet straight downward, to alight with accuracy on a single log floating free in the current.And then in the very glory and chaos of the jam itself he was swept down-stream.
