ry circumstances Ruth and the other
girls who had accompanied her West thought they would have feared to
venture upon. The Indian girl, however, seemed to consider the
circumstances not at all threatening.

With her on the river, but instructed to keep on either side and well
out of the focus of the cameras, were two expert rivermen, each in a
canoe. These men were on the alert to assist Wonota if, when the dam was
broken, she should get into any difficulty.

Below the dam the men were arranged at important points, so that if the
logs and drift threatened to pile up after the boom was cut, they could
jump in with their pike-poles and keep the drift moving. On one shore
the cameras were placed, and Jim Hooley, with his megaphone, stood on a
prominent rock.

Across from the director's station Ruth found a spot at the foot of a
sheer bank to the brow of which a great pile of logs had been rolled,
ready for the real freshet in the spring when the log-drives would
start. She had a good view of all that went on across the river, and up
the stream.

Jennie suggested that she and Helen accompany Ruth and watch the taking
of the picture from that vantage point, a proposal to which Helen
readily agreed. But Ruth evaded this suggestion of her two friends, for
she wanted to keep her whole mind on her work, and when Helen and Jennie
were with her she found it impossible to keep from listening to their
merry chatter, nor could she keep herself from being drawn into it. The
upshot was that, after some discussion by the three girls, Ruth set off
alone for her station under the brow of the steep river bank.

About ten o'clock, in mid-forenoon, Hooley was satisfied that everything
was ready to shoot the picture. One of the foremen of Benbow Camp--the
best ax wielder of the crew--ran out on the boom to a point near the
middle of the frothing stream and began cutting the key-log. It was a
ticklish piece of work; but these timbermen were used to such jobs.

The gash in the log showed wider and wider. Where Ruth stood she cocked
her head to listen to the strokes of the axman. It seemed to her that
there was a particularly strange echo, flattened but keen, as though
reverberating from the bank of the river high above her head.

"Now, what can that be?" she thought, and once looked up the slope to
the heap of logs which were held in place by chocks on the very verge of
the steep descent.

If those logs should break away, Ruth realized