ucked in and out of their shoes.

Behind the rear Big Junko poled his bateau backwards and forwards
exploding dynamite. Many of the bottom tiers of logs in the rollways had
been frozen down, and Big Junko had to loosen them from the bed of the
stream. He was a big man, this, as his nickname indicated, built of many
awkwardnesses. His cheekbones were high, his nose flat, his lips thick
and slobbery. He sported a wide, ferocious straggling mustache and long
eye-brows, under which gleamed little fierce eyes. His forehead sloped
back like a beast's, but was always hidden by a disreputable felt hat.
Big Junko did not know much, and had the passions of a wild animal, but
he was a reckless riverman and devoted to Thorpe. Just now he exploded
dynamite.

The sticks of powder were piled amidships. Big Junko crouched over them,
inserting the fuses and caps, closing the openings with soap, finally
lighting them, and dropping them into the water alongside, where they
immediately sank. Then a few strokes of a short paddle took him barely
out of danger. He huddled down in his craft, waiting. One, two, three
seconds passed. Then a hollow boom shook the stream. A cloud of water
sprang up, strangely beautiful. After a moment the great brown logs rose
suddenly to the surface from below, one after the other, like leviathans
of the deep. And Junko watched, dimly fascinated, in his rudimentary
animal's brain, by the sight of the power he had evoked to his aid.

When night came the men rode down stream to where the wanigan had
made camp. There they slept, often in blankets wetted by the wanigan's
eccentricities, to leap to their feet at the first cry in early morning.
Some days it rained, in which case they were wet all the time. Almost
invariably there was a jam to break, though strangely enough almost
every one of the old-timers believed implicitly that "in the full of the
moon logs will run free at night."

Thorpe and Tim Shearer nearly always slept in a dog tent at the rear;
though occasionally they passed the night at Dam Two, where Bryan
Moloney and his crew were already engaged in sluicing the logs through
the chute.

The affair was simple enough. Long booms arranged in the form of an open
V guided the drive to the sluice gate, through which a smooth apron
of water rushed to turmoil in an eddying pool below. Two men tramped
steadily backwards and forwards on the booms, urging the logs forward
by means of long pike poles to where t