e stripings of red signaled danger. He found
a sack in the craft. He pried open one of the boxes and out of the
sawdust in which they were packed he drew brown cylinders and tucked
them carefully into the sack. The cylinders were sticks of dynamite. The
sack was capacious and he stuffed it full. The bag sagged heavily with
the weight of the load when he swung it over his shoulder and started up
the bank, away from the river.

When Latisan walked away from Lida the mist again had lent its illusion,
and he seemed to become of heroic size before the gray screen hid him
from her sight.

Vittum tried pathetically to relieve the stress of the silence.

"The last peek at him made him look big enough to do 'most anything he
sets out to do."

"Yes! But how can he fight them all single-handed?" She was pale and
trembling.

"If I'm any judge, by the direction he took just now he has gone up and
tapped our stock of canned thunder, miss. And if I ain't mistook about
his notions, he is going to sound just about as big as he looked when we
got that last peek!"

The rivermen did not lounge on the ground, as they usually did when they
were resting. They stood, tensely waiting for what Latisan's manner of
resolution had promised.

Lida asked no more questions; she was unable to control her tones. She
had been given a hint of Ward's intentions by what the old man had said
about the "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the
probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the
risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness
unendurable.

It seemed to them, waiting there, that what Latisan had undertaken was
never going to happen. They were not checking off the time in minutes;
for them time was standing still. The far grumble of waters in the gorge
merely accentuated the hush--did not break upon the profound silence.
When a chickadee lilted near at hand the men started nervously and the
girl uttered a low cry; even a bird's note had power to trip their
nervous tension.

The sound for which they were waiting came to them at last.

It was a sound with a thud in it!

Listeners who possessed an imagination would have found a suggestion of
the crash of the hammer of Thor upon the mountain top.

"He looked big enough for that when he left us!" muttered the old man.
He had never heard of the pagan divinity whom men called Thor. His mind
was on the river gladiator who had decl