their short kersey trousers "stagged"
off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork
boots"--all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most
interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little
round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those
eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were
steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous
blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all
without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry
humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I
knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine
full, and an ironical voice drawled,

"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your
long-lost friend?"

The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and
that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the
emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed
help he was willing to offer it.

"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's
headed for."

He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped
light curls.

"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."

I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
water among filled booms.

"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
apart."

A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back
and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran
the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
statue of bronze.

A roar approved this feat.

"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He'