s hell
_and_ repeat. Watch him."

The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.

For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
the air. Then suddenly _slap! slap!_ the heavy caulks stamped a
reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
some animal that had been spurred through its paces.

"Magnificent!" I cried.

"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
log. Watch this."

Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
Then he turned a somersault.

This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which
was lost in a general roar.

A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to
the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood
facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they
commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like
squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent
that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the
log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately,
he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into
the river with a mighty splash.

"Clean birled!" commented my friend.

One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick,
but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set
them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and
managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had
apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his
entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young
fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a
horse's head.

The crowd was by now gett