face of the breaking jam.

Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, falling,
diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a treadmill, a
treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when he finally
gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath him and the
man he had saved.

It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was
work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation
they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was
moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. Roaring Dick,
like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked
the jam in a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the
timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic
forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle
the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the
curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before
the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight around the lower bend swept the
front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great boom
back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the slackening
current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow sound one
against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning statuesquely on the
shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered ranks pass by.

One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the
brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with
sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts.

The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near
the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At
dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down-river trail.

The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return
in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had
turned away with a gesture of farewell.

Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had
disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died
toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a face from
which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods-worker had
faded. It was wide-eyed with an almost awe-stricken wonder and
adoration.

"Do you know who that is?" he asked me in a hushed voice. "That's
Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. A