d
reached the intensity of execution. Across their purpose Thorpe threw
violently his personality.

"You must not go," he commanded.

Through their anger they looked at him askance.

"I forbid it," Thorpe cried.

They shrugged their indifference and arose. This was an affair of caste
brotherhood; and the blood of their mates cried out to them.

"The work," Thorpe shouted hoarsely. "The work! We must get those logs
out! We haven't time!"

But the Fighting Forty had not Thorpe's ideal. Success meant a day's
work well done; while vengeance stood for a righting of the realities
which had been unrighteously overturned. Thorpe's dry-eyed, burning,
almost mad insistence on the importance of the day's task had not its
ordinary force. They looked upon him from a standpoint apart, calmly,
dispassionately, as one looks on a petulant child. The grim call of
tragedy had lifted them above little mundane things.

Then swiftly between the white, strained face of the madman trying to
convince his heart that his mind had been right, and the fanatically
exalted rivermen, interposed the sanity of Radway. The old jobber faced
the men calmly, almost humorously, and somehow the very bigness of
the man commanded attention. When he spoke, his coarse, good-natured,
everyday voice fell through the tense situation, clarifying it,
restoring it to the normal.

"You fellows make me sick," said he. "You haven't got the sense God gave
a rooster. Don't you see you're playing right in those fellows' hands?
What do you suppose they dynamited them dams for? To kill our boys?
Don't you believe it for a minute. They never dreamed we was dry pickin'
that jam. They sent some low-lived whelp down there to hang our drive,
and by smoke it looks like they was going to succeed, thanks to you
mutton-heads.

"'Spose you go over and take 'em apart; what then? You have a scrap;
probably you lick 'em." The men growled ominously, but did not stir.
"You whale daylights out of a lot of men who probably don't know any
more about this here shooting of our dams than a hog does about a
ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well? Well? Do you suppose
the men who were back of that shooting, do you suppose Morrison and Daly
give a tinker's dam how many men of theirs you lick? What they want is
to hang our drive. If they hang our drive, it's cheap at the price of a
few black eyes."

The speaker paused and grinned good-humoredly at the men's attentive
faces. Then