ern
prevented the current from throwing her broadside to the rush of waters;
another cable from the bow led her in the way she should go. Ten
minutes later she was pulled ashore out of the eddy below, very much
water-logged, and manned by a drenched and disgruntled crew.

But Orde allowed them little chance for lamentation.

"Hard luck!" he said briefly. "Hope you haven't lost much. Now get a
move on you and bail out. You've got to get over the shallows while this
head is on."

"That's all the thanks you get," grumbled Charlie to himself and the
other three as Orde moved away. "Work, slave, get up in the night,
drownd yourself--"

He happily discovered that the pails under the forward thwart had not
been carried away, and all started in to bail. It was a back-breaking
job, and consumed the greater part of two hours. Even at the end of that
time the wanigan, though dry of loose water, floated but sluggishly.

"'Bout two ton of water in them bed-rolls and turkeys," grumbled
Charlie. "Well, get at it!"

Newmark soon discovered that the progress of the wanigan was looked upon
in the light of a side-show by the rivermen. Its appearance was
signal for shouts of delighted and ironic encouragement; its
tribulations--which at first, in the white-water, were many--the
occasion for unsympathetic and unholy joy. Charlie looked on all
spectators as enemies. Part of the time he merely glowered. Part of the
time he tried to reply in kind. To his intense disgust, he was taken
seriously in neither case.

In a couple of hours' run the wanigan had overtaken and left far behind
the rear of the drive. All about floated the logs, caroming gently one
against the other, shifting and changing the pattern of their brown
against the blue of the water. The current flowed strongly and smoothly,
but without obstruction. Everything went well. The banks slipped by
silently and mysteriously, like the unrolling of a panorama--little
strips of marshland, stretches of woodland where the great trees leaned
out over the river, thickets of overflowed swampland with the water
rising and draining among roots in a strange regularity of its own. The
sun shone warm. There was no wind. Newmark wrung out his outer
garments, and basked below the gunwale. Zeke and his companion pulled
spasmodically on the sweeps. Charlie, having regained his equanimity
together with his old brown derby, which he came upon floating sodden
in an eddy, marched up and down the b