the drive in it and away from the shallows near either bank.
The profile of these cribs was that of a right-angled triangle, the
slanting side up stream. Booms chained between them helped deflect the
drive from the shoals. Their more important office, however, was to give
footing to the drivers.

For twenty-five miles then nothing of importance was undertaken. Two
or three particularly bad boulders were split out by the explosion
of powder charges; a number of snags and old trees were cut away and
disposed of; the channel was carefully examined for obstructions of any
kind whatever. Then the party came to the falls.

Here Orde purposed his most elaborate bit of rough engineering. The
falls were only about fifteen feet high, but they fell straight down to
a bed of sheer rock. This had been eaten by the eddies into pot-holes
and crannies until a jagged irregular scoop-hollow had formed
immediately underneath the fall. Naturally this implied a ledge below.

In flood time the water boiled and roared through this obstruction in
a torrent. The saw logs, caught in the rush, plunged end on into the
scoop-hollow, hit with a crash, and were spewed out below more or less
battered, barked, and stripped. Sometimes, however, when the chance of
the drive brought down a hundred logs together, they failed to shoot
over the barrier of the ledge. Then followed a jam, a bad jam, difficult
and dangerous to break. The falls had taken her usurious share of the
lives the river annually demands as her toll.

This condition of affairs Orde had determined, if possible, to obviate.
From the thirty-five or forty miles of river that lay above, and from
its tributaries would come the bulk of the white and Norway pine for
years to follow. At least two thirds of each drive Orde figured would
come from above the fall.

"If," said he to North, "we could carry an apron on a slant from just
under the crest and over the pot-holes, it would shoot both the water
and the logs off a better angle."

"Sure," agreed North, "but you'll have fun placing your apron with all
that water running through. Why, it would drown us!"

"I've got a notion on that," said Orde. "First thing is to get the
material together."

A hardwood forest topped the slope. Into this went the axe-men. The
straightest trees they felled, trimmed, and dragged, down travoy trails
they constructed, on sleds they built for the purpose, to the banks of
the river. Here they bored the two ho