here was no clash
between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone
and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end
of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but
just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could damn a
man merely by bidding him good-morning.

"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe
would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the
night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have
learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham
was missing no chances.

"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told
Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip. "They are turning
their attention to their float dams, now!"

And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch
he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on
strike.

With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pass on to his
daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is,
all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time,
and not to the opposition which he was meeting. Her excitement was a
bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a
war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into
position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.

Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time
destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful
intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness. She saw
less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs
were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend
most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who
appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship. Always she insisted
that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers
with both of them, in anticipation of their journey north, against the
first of May. But there was one bit of news which her father had not
been able to pass on to her. For Dexter Allison had had no way of
learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had
finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and
forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.

It was the bitterest January that the hill country had