moment to
see it break out and go down; but the tough spruce logs held.

By noon, all the crew had come up. The jam filled the whole river for
a third of a mile back from the fall, so completely that during the
afternoon the west bank gangs crossed on it to the east side. We
lighted our fires on the ledges; and as the evening advanced it was a
picturesque sight--a hundred and fifty red-shirted drivers camping
there and sitting in messes about their coarse fare.

All the next day we worked with the warps. Nooses were dropped over
the upright ends of the logs at the foot of the jam, and the whole
gang was set to pull on them. Later in the day, a heavy capstan was
rigged. The hawsers broke like twine. It was impossible to start a
log, so tremendous was the weight of water and lumber combined.

Next day, the jam was mined with powder placed in water-tight
molasses-casks and connected with fire at the top of the ledges by
means of tarred fuses. The blasts blew out splinters freely, but
failed to break or dislodge the large sticks. Villate fumed and
sweated. Unless the drive went down to market, not a dollar would be
paid to one of us; so he declared. "If you want your pay, break the
jam," was his constant exhortation, enforced by vigorous curses; and,
indeed, we had been hired on these terms; wages to be paid when the
drive reached Montreal--not before. This is a common rule, or used to
be; the men have thus a strong interest in the driving.

A plan was mooted among the messes that following night, to cut out
the front logs. The same scheme has been often put in execution. It
was argued that by stretching a warping-line across the rapids,
from cliff to cliff, directly over the foot of the jam, a man might
be lowered on it, with his axe, and cut away the logs. A large
"basket"--so it was talked--might be swung on the cable. By slackening
the line the axe-man could be lowered to the logs; and the instant the
sticks cracked under the strokes, he could leap to the "basket" and be
pulled out of harm's way, and let the jam go through under him. The
idea gained favor. The following morning the end of one of the seven
hundred foot lines was taken across on the jam to the ledges on the
west bank. Fifty men went over with it, to handle it. With a hundred
men there was no difficulty in lowering and raising it at will. When
drawn taut, it hung sixty feet above the foot of the jam. One of the
Indian drivers, named Lahmunt, had been a