with a splash that threw the water high to either side, immediately
caught his equilibrium, and set to work with his peavy. He seemed to
know just where to bend his efforts. Two, then three, logs, disentangled
from the mass, floated away. Finally, all moved slowly forward. The
riverman intent on his work, was swept from view.

"After he gets them to running free, he'll come ashore," said Welton, in
answer to Bob's query. "Oh, just paddle ashore with his peavy. Then
he'll come back up the trail. This bend is liable to jam, and so we have
to keep a man here."

They walked on and on, up the trail. Every once in a while they came
upon other members of the jam crew, either watching, as was the first
man, at some critical point, or working in twos and threes to keep the
reluctant timbers always moving. At one place six or eight were picking
away busily at a jam that had formed bristling quite across the river.
Bob would have liked to stop to watch; but Welton's practised eye saw
nothing to it.

"They're down to the key log, now," he pronounced. "They'll have it out
in a jiffy."

Inside of two miles or so farther they left behind them the last member
of the jam crew and came upon an outlying scout of the "rear." Then
Welton began to take the shorter trails. At the end of another half-hour
the two plumped into the full activity of the rear itself.

Bob saw two crews of men, one on either bank, busily engaged in
restoring to the current the logs stranded along the shore. In some
cases this merely meant pushing them afloat by means of the peavies.
Again, when the timbers had gone hard aground, they had to be rolled
over and over until the deeper water caught them. In extreme cases, when
evidently the freshet water had dropped away from them, leaving them
high and dry, a number of men would clamp on the jaws of their peavies
and carry the logs bodily to the water. In this active work the men were
everywhere across the surface of the river. They pushed and heaved from
the instability of the floating logs as easily as though they had
possessed beneath their feet the advantages of solid land. When they
wanted to go from one place to another across the clear water they had
various methods of propelling themselves--either broad on, by rolling
the log treadwise, or endways by paddling, or by jumping strongly on one
end. The logs dipped and bobbed and rolled beneath them; the water
flowed over their feet; but always they seemed to m