an inch an hour right along.
When she backs up once, she'll push this jam out sure."

Wallace ran to the boarding house and roused his partner from a heavy
sleep. The latter understood the situation at a word. While dressing, he
explained to the younger man wherein lay the danger.

"If the jam breaks once," said he, "nothing top of earth can prevent
it from going out into the Lake, and there it'll scatter, Heaven knows
where. Once scattered, it is practically a total loss. The salvage
wouldn't pay the price of the lumber."

They felt blindly through the rain in the direction of the lights on
the tug and pile-driver. Shearer, the water dripping from his flaxen
mustache, joined them like a shadow.

"I heard you come in," he explained to Carpenter. At the river he
announced his opinion. "We can hold her all right," he assured them.
"It'll take a few more piles, but by morning the storm'll be over, and
she'll begin to go down again."

The three picked their way over the creaking, swaying timber. But when
they reached the pile-driver, they found trouble afoot. The crew had
mutinied, and refused longer to drive piles under the face of the jam.

"If she breaks loose, she's going to bury us," said they.

"She won't break," snapped Shearer, "get to work."

"It's dangerous," they objected sullenly.

"By God, you get off this driver," shouted Solly. "Go over and lie down
in a ten-acre lot, and see if you feel safe there!"

He drove them ashore with a storm of profanity and a multitude of kicks,
his steel-blue eyes blazing.

"There's nothing for it but to get the boys out again," said Tim; "I
kinder hate to do it."

But when the Fighting Forty, half asleep but dauntless, took charge of
the driver, a catastrophe made itself known. One of the ejected men had
tripped the lifting chain of the hammer after another had knocked away
the heavy preventing block, and so the hammer had fallen into the river
and was lost. None other was to be had. The pile driver was useless.

A dozen men were at once despatched for cables, chains, and wire ropes
from the supply at the warehouse.

"I'd like to have those whelps here," cried Shearer, "I'd throw them
under the jam."

"It's part of the same trick," said Thorpe grimly; "those fellows have
their men everywhere among us. I don't know whom to trust."

"You think it's Morrison & Daly?" queried Carpenter astonished.

"Think? I know it. They know as well as you or I that if we save