nt death to the delinquent.
Thus it was literally true that each one of these men was called upon
almost daily to wager his personal skill against his destruction.

In the meantime the rear was "sacking" its way as fast as possible,
moving camp with the wanigan whenever necessary, working very hard and
very cold and very long. In its work, however, beyond the breaking of
the rollways, was little of the spectacular.

Orde, after the rear was well started, patrolled the length of the
drive in his light buckboard. He had a first-class team of young
horses--high-spirited, somewhat fractious, but capable on a pinch
of their hundred miles in a day. He handled them well over the rough
corduroys and swamp roads. From jam to rear and back again he travelled,
pausing on the river banks to converse earnestly with one of the
foremen, surveying the situation with the bird's-eye view of the
general. At times he remained at one camp for several days watching the
trend of the work. The improvements made during the preceding summer
gave him the greatest satisfaction, especially the apron at the falls.

"We'd have had a dozen bad jams here before now with all these logs in
the river," said he to Tim Nolan, who was in charge of that beat.

"And as it is," said Tim, "we've had but the one little wing jam."

The piers to define the channel along certain shallows also saved the
rear crew much labour in the matter of stranded logs. Everything was
very satisfactory. Even old man Reed held to his chastened attitude,
and made no trouble. In fact, he seemed glad to turn an honest penny by
boarding the small crew in charge of sluicing the logs.

No trouble was experienced until Heinzman's rollways were reached.
Here Orde had, as he had promised his partner, boomed a free channel to
prevent Heinzman from filling up the entire river-bed with his rollways.
When the jam of the drive had descended the river as far as this, Orde
found that Heinzman had not yet begun to break out. Hardly had Orde's
first crew passed, however, when Heinzman's men began to break down the
logs into the drive. Long before the rear had caught up, all Heinzman's
drive was in the water, inextricably mingled with the sixty or eighty
million feet Orde had in charge.

The situation was plain. All Heinzman now had to do was to retain a
small crew, which should follow after the rear in order to sack what
logs the latter should leave stranded. This amounted practically to
noth