derstand it. Everything
was in good shape, as far as I could see. It didn't act like an ordinary
break. The water came too fast. Why, it was as dry as a bone until just
as that wave came along. An ordinary break would have eaten through
little by little before it burst, and Davis should have been able to
stop it. This came all at once, as if the dam had disappeared. I don't
see."

His mind of the professional had already began to query causes.

"How about the men?" asked Wallace. "Isn't there something I can do?"

"You can head a hunt down the river," answered Thorpe. "I think it is
useless until the water goes down. Poor Jimmy. He was one of the best
men I had. I wouldn't have had this happen--"

The horror of the scene was at last beginning to filter through numbness
into Wallace Carpenter's impressionable imagination.

"No, no!" he cried vehemently. "There is something criminal about it to
me! I'd rather lose every log in the river!"

Thorpe looked at him curiously. "It is one of the chances of war," said
he, unable to refrain from the utterance of his creed. "We all know it."

"I'd better divide the crew and take in both banks of the river,"
suggested Wallace in his constitutional necessity of doing something.

"See if you can't get volunteers from this crowd," suggested Thorpe.
"I can let you have two men to show you trails. If you can make it that
way, it will help me out. I need as many of the crew as possible to use
this flood water."

"Oh, Harry," cried Carpenter, shocked. "You can't be going to work again
to-day after that horrible sight, before we have made the slightest
effort to recover the bodies!"

"If the bodies can be recovered, they shall be," replied Thorpe quietly.
"But the drive will not wait. We have no dams to depend on now, you must
remember, and we shall have to get out on freshet water."

"Your men won't work. I'd refuse just as they will!" cried Carpenter,
his sensibilities still suffering.

Thorpe smiled proudly. "You do not know them. They are mine. I hold them
in the hollow of my hand!"

"By Jove!" cried the journalist in sudden enthusiasm. "By Jove! that is
magnificent!"

The men of the river crew had crouched on their narrow footholds while
the jam went out. Each had clung to his peavey, as is the habit of
rivermen. Down the current past their feet swept the debris of flood.
Soon logs began to swirl by,--at first few, then many from the remaining
rollways which the river