episode.

"I know that sort of crazy old mossback," muttered Welton as he turned
down the mountain. "Pin a tin star on them and they think they're as
important as hell!"

Bob looked back.

"I don't know," he said vaguely. "I'm kind of for that old coon."

The bend shut him out. After the buckboard had dipped into the horseshoe
and out to the next point, they again looked back. The smoke of marching
rose above the trees to eddy lazily up the mountain. California John, a
tiny figure now, still sat patiently guarding the portals of an empty
duty.

VII

Bob and Welton left the buckboard at Sycamore Flats and rode up to the
mill by a detour. There they plunged into active work. The labour of
getting the new enterprise under way proved to be tremendous. A very
competent woods foreman, named Post, was in charge of the actual
logging, so Welton gave his undivided attention to the mill work. All
day the huge peeled timbers slid and creaked along the greased slides,
dragged mightily by a straining wire cable that snapped and swung
dangerously. When they had reached the solid "bank" that slanted down
toward the mill, the obstreperous "bull" donkey lowered its crest of
white steam, coughed, and was still. A man threw over the first of these
timbers a heavy rope, armed with a hook, that another man drove home
with a blow of his sledge. The rope tightened. Over rolled the log, out
from the greased slide, to come, finally, to rest among its fellows at
the entrance to the mill.

Thence it disappeared, moved always by steam-driven hooks, for these
great logs could not be managed by hand implements. The sawyers, at
their levers, controlled the various activities. When the time came the
smooth, deadly steel ribbon of the modern bandsaws hummed hungrily into
the great pines; the automatic roller hurried the new-sawn boards to the
edgers; little cars piled high with them shot out from the cool dimness
into the dazzling sunlight; men armed with heavy canvas or leather
stacked them in the yards; and then----

That was the trouble; and then, nothing!

From this point they should have gone farther. Clamped in rectangular
bundles, pushing the raging white water before their blunt noses, as
strange craft they should have been flashing at regular intervals down
the twisting, turning and plunging course of the flume. Arrived safely
at the bottom, the eight-and twelve-horse teams should have taken them
in charge, dragging them by