les through either end to receive
the bolts when later they should be locked together side by side in
their places. As fast as they were prepared, men with cant-hooks rolled
them down the slope to a flat below the falls. They did these things
swiftly and well, because they were part of the practised day's work,
but they shook their heads at the falls.

After the trees had been cut in sufficient number--there were
seventy-five of them, each twenty-six feet long--Orde led the way back
up stream a half mile to a shallows, where he commanded the construction
of a number of exaggerated sawhorses with very widespread slanting legs.
In the meantime the cook-wagon and the bed-wagon had evidently been
making many trips to Sand Creek, fifteen miles away, as was attested by
a large pile of heavy planks. When the sawhorses were completed, Orde
directed the picks and shovels to be brought up.

At this point the river, as has been hinted, widened over shoals. The
banks at either hand, too, were flat and comparatively low. As is often
the case in bends of rivers subject to annual floods, the banks sloped
back for some distance into a lower black-ash swamp territory.

Orde set his men to digging a channel through this bank. It was no
slight job, from one point of view, as the slope down into the swamp
began only at a point forty or fifty feet inland; but on the other hand
the earth was soft and free from rocks. When completed the channel gave
passage to a rather feeble streamlet from the outer fringe of the river.
The men were puzzled, but Orde, by the strange freak of his otherwise
frank and open nature, as usual told nothing of his plans, even to Tom
North.

"He can't expect to turn that river," said Tim Nolan, who was once more
with the crew. "He'd have to dig a long ways below that level to catch
the main current--and then some."

"Let him alone," advised North, puffing at his short pipe. "He's wiser
than a tree full of owls."

Next Orde assigned two men to each of the queer-shaped sawhorses, and
instructed them to place the horses in a row across the shallowest
part of the river, and broadside to the stream. This was done. The men,
half-way to their knees in the swift water, bore down heavily to keep
their charges in place. Other men immediately began to lay the heavy
planks side by side, perpendicular to and on the up-stream side of the
horses. The weight of the water clamped them in place; big rocks and
gravel shovelled o