ound ice-floor. And then, one night, the ice went out.

Titanically it went, and noisily, with the crash and grind of broken
cakes; and in the morning the river rushed black, and deep, and
swollen, its roiled waters tearing sullenly at crumbling banks, while
upon its muddy surface heaved belated ice-cakes and uprooted trees.

At daylight men crowded the bank, the bend watchers strung out and took
up their positions, and white-water men stood by with sharp axes to
break out the rollways.

The first rollway broke badly.

A thick-butted log slanted and met the others head-on as they thundered
down the bank, tossing them high in the air whence they fell splashing
into the river, or crashed backward among the tumbling logs, upending,
and hurling them about like jack-straws.

The air was filled with the heavy rumble of rolling logs as other
rollways tore loose at the swift blows of the axes, where, at the crack
of toggle-pins, men leaped from in front of the rolling, crushing
death; and the surface of the river became black with bucking, pitching
logs which shot to the opposite bank.

Coincident with the snapping of the first toggle-pin, the branches of a
gigantic, storm-blasted pine, whose earth-laded butt dragged heavily
along the bottom of the river, became firmly entangled in the
low-hanging limbs of a sweeper, and swung sluggishly across the
current.

Against this obstruction crashed the leaping, upending logs of the
wrecked rollway. Other logs swept in and wedged, forcing the heavy butt
and the riven trunk of the huge tree firmly against the rocks at the
head of the rapid.

Rollway after rollway tore loose and the released logs, swept downward
by the resistless push of the current, climbed one upon another and
lodged. Higher and higher the jam towered, the interlocking logs piling
in hopeless tangle.

Moncrossen was beside himself. Up and down the bank he rushed,
bellowing orders and hurling curses at the men who, gripping their
peaveys, swarmed over the heaving jam like flies.

The bateau men, forty of them, lifted the heavy boat bodily, and
working it out to the very forefront of the jam, lowered it into the
water, while other men made the heavy cable fast to the trunk of a
tree. Close under the towering pile the bateau was snubbed with a
short, light line, and the men clambered shoreward, leaving only
Moncrossen, Stromberg, Fallon, and one other to search for the key-log.

It was a comparatively simple