. Now it became necessary to start
the rear.

For this purpose Billy Camp, the cook, had loaded his cook-stove, a
quantity of provisions, and a supply of bedding, aboard a scow. The
scow was built of tremendous hewn timbers, four or five inches thick,
to withstand the shock of the logs. At either end were long sweeps to
direct its course. The craft was perhaps forty feet long, but rather
narrow, in order that it might pass easily through the chute of a dam.
It was called the "wanigan."

Billy Camp, his cookee, and his crew of two were now doomed to
tribulation. The huge, unwieldy craft from that moment was to become
possessed of the devil. Down the white water of rapids it would bump,
smashing obstinately against boulders, impervious to the frantic urging
of the long sweeps; against the roots and branches of the streamside
it would scrape with the perverseness of a vicious horse; in the broad
reaches it would sulk, refusing to proceed; and when expediency demanded
its pause, it would drag Billy Camp and his entire crew at the rope's
end, while they tried vainly to snub it against successively uprooted
trees and stumps. When at last the wanigan was moored fast for the
night,--usually a mile or so below the spot planned,--Billy Camp pushed
back his battered old brown derby hat, the badge of his office, with
a sigh of relief. To be sure he and his men had still to cut wood,
construct cooking and camp fires, pitch tents, snip browse, and prepare
supper for seventy men; but the hard work of the day was over. Billy
Camp did not mind rain or cold--he would cheerfully cook away with the
water dripping from his battered derby to his chubby and cold-purpled
nose--but he did mind the wanigan. And the worst of it was, he got no
sympathy nor aid from the crew. From either bank he and his anxious
struggling assistants were greeted with ironic cheers and facetious
remarks. The tribulations of the wanigan were as the salt of life to the
spectators.

Billy Camp tried to keep back of the rear in clear water, but when the
wanigan so disposed, he found himself jammed close in the logs. There
he had a chance in his turn to become spectator, and so to repay in kind
some of the irony and facetiousness.

Along either bank, among the bushes, on sandbars, and in trees, hundreds
and hundreds of logs had been stranded when the main drive passed. These
logs the rear crew were engaged in restoring to the current.

And as a man had to be able t