contrast to the faint snow-chill that even yet lingered in the
shadows. Sounds carried clearly, so that the shouts and banter of the
rivermen were plainly audible up the reaches of the river. Ashore moist
and aggressive green things were pushing up through the watery earth
from which, in shade, the last frost had not yet departed. At camp the
fires roared invitingly. Charlie's grub was hot and grateful. The fir
beds gave dreamless sleep.

Newmark followed the work of the log-drive with great interest. All day
long he tramped back and forth--on jam one day, on rear the next. He
never said much, but watched keenly, and listened to the men's banter
both on the work and about the evening's fire as though he enjoyed
it. Gradually the men got used to him, and ceased to treat him as an
outsider. His thin, eager face, his steel-blue, inquiring eyes behind
the glasses, his gray felt hat, his lank, tense figure in its gray,
became a familiar feature. They threw remarks to him, to which he
replied briefly and drily. When anything interesting was going on,
somebody told him about it. Then he hurried to the spot, no matter how
distant it might be. He used always the river trail; he never attempted
to ride the logs.

He seemed to depend most on observation, for he rarely asked any
questions. What few queries he had to proffer, he made to Orde himself,
waiting sometimes until evening to interview that busy and good-natured
individual. Then his questions were direct and to the point. They
related generally to the advisability of something he had seen done;
only rarely did they ask for explanation of the work itself. That
Newmark seemed capable of puzzling out for himself.

The drive, as has been said, went down as far as Redding in thirty-three
days. It had its share of tribulation. The men worked fourteen and
sixteen hours at times. Several bad jams relieved the monotony. Three
dams had to be sluiced through. Problems of mechanics arose to be solved
on the spot; problems that an older civilisation would have attacked
deliberately and with due respect for the seriousness of the situation
and the dignity of engineering. Orde solved them by a rough-and-ready
but very effective rule of thumb. He built and abandoned structures
which would have furnished opportunity for a winter's discussion to some
committees; just as, earlier in the work, the loggers had built through
a rough country some hundreds of miles of road better than railroad