and
driftwood might slide without jamming between the piers. Savine, being
pressed for time, had brought in a motley collection of workmen, picked
up haphazard in the seaboard cities. After bargaining to work for
certain wages, these workmen had demanded twenty per cent. more.
Thurston, who had picked his own assistants carefully, among the sturdy
ranchers, and had aided Savine's representative in resisting this
demand, now surmised that the malcontents were meditating mischief.
There were some mighty mean rascals among them, his foreman said.

"You're looking worried again," observed his companion, presently, and
Thurston answered, "Perhaps I am. I wish Davies would run his logs
down by daylight, but presumably the stream is too fast for him when
the waters rise. It might give some of your friends yonder an
opportunity, Summers."

"You don't figure they're capable of wrecking the bridge?" replied
Summers, showing sudden uneasiness.

"One or two among them, including the man I had to thrash, are capable
of anything. Perhaps you had better hail your watchman," Thurston said.

Summers blew a whistle, and an answer came back faintly through the
fret of the river: "Plenty saw logs coming down. All of them handy
sizes and sliding safely through."

"That's good enough," declared Summers. "I'm not made of cast-iron,
and need a little sleep at times, so good-night to you!"

He departed with the cheerful confidence of the salaried man, and
Thurston, who fought for his own interests, flung himself down on his
trestle cot with all his clothes on. Neither the timber slide nor the
bridge was quite finished, but because rivers in that region shrink at
night when the frost checks the drainage from the feeding glaciers on
the peaks above, the saw-miller had insisted on driving down his logs
when there was less chance of their stranding on the shoals that
cumbered the high-water channel. Thurston lay awake for some time,
listening to the fret of the river, which vibrated far across the
silence of the hills, and to the occasional crash of a mighty log
smiting the slide. Hardly had his eyelids closed when he was aroused
by a sound of hurried footsteps approaching the tent. He stood wide
awake in the entrance before the newcomer reached it.

"There's a mighty big pine caught its butt on one slide and jammed its
thin end across the pier," said the man. "Logs piling up behind it
already!"

As he spoke somebody beat upon