night Darrell was down to see about
some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty
feet high, and lots of water in the river."

"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.

"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look
at her?"

"I think I should," I assented.

The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through wastes of
pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until
finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a
mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the
timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby
hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers
were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep
an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the
regular _clank, clank, click_ of the peavies.

I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above
the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I
could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow
dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square,
strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to
a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.

The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the
height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of
it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently
inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed
me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this
wonderful _chevaux de frise_ foamed the current of the river,
irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.

A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to
the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one
into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been
doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight
impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they
would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the
freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly
over the plunging logs to shore.

My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey Darrell. He
was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log