the same time.
Birds flashed like spangles against the blue. Others sang and darted and
scratched and chirped everywhere. Tiny chipmunks no bigger than
half-grown rats scampered fearlessly about. What Bob took for larger
chipmunks--the Douglas Squirrels--perched on the new fence posts. The
world seemed alive--alive through its creatures, through the solemn,
uplifting vitality of its forests, through the sprouting, budding spring
growths just bursting into green, through the wine-draught of its very
air, through the hurrying, busy preoccupied murmur of its streams. Bob
breathed his lungs full again and again, and tingled from head to foot.

"How high are we here?" he called to Welton.

"About six thousand. Why? Getting short-winded?"

"I could run ten miles," replied Bob. "Come on. I'm going to look at the
stream."

"Not at a run," protested Welton. "No, sir! At a nice, middle-aged,
dignified, fat _walk_!"

They sauntered down the length of the trestle, with its miniature steel
tracks, to where the flume began. It proved to be a very solidly built
V-trough, alongside which ran a footboard. Welton pointed to the
telephone wire that paralleled it.

"When we get going," said he, "we just turn the stream in here, clamp
our sawn lumber into bundles of the right size, and 'let her went!'
There'll be three stations along the line, connected by 'phone, to see
that things go all right. That flume's six mile long."

Bob strode to the gate, and after some heaving and hauling succeeded in
throwing water into the flume.

"I wanted to see her go," he explained.

"Now if you want some real fun," said Welton, gazing after the foaming
advance wave as it ripped its way down the chute. "You make you a sort
of three-cornered boat just to fit the angle of the flume; and then you
lie down in it and go to Sycamore Flats, in about six minutes more or
less."

"You mean to say that's done?" cried Bob.

"Often. It only means knocking together a plank or so."

"Doesn't the lumber ever jump the flume?"

"Once in a great while."

"Suppose the boat should do it?"

"Then," said Welton drily, "it's probable you'd have to begin learning
to tune a harp."

"Not for mine," said Bob with fervour. "Any time I yearn for Sycamore
Flats real hard, I'll go by hand."

He shut off the water, and the two walked a little farther to a bold
point that pressed itself beyond the trees.

Below them the cliff dropped away so steeply that they looked