was his reply.
“Want to quit?” he inquired, with mock solicitude.
“Nary quit.”
Orde's shout of laughter broke the night silence of the whispering breeze and the rushing water.
“We'll stick to 'em like death to a dead nigger,” was his comment.
Newmark, having extracted a kind of cardigan jacket from the bag he had brought with him as far as the mill, looked at the smooth, iron-black water and shivered.
When the meal was finished, the men lit their pipes and went back to work philosophically. With entire absorption in the task, they dug, chopped, and picked. The dull sound of blows, the gurgle and trickle of the water, the occasional grunt or brief comment of a riverman alone broke the calm of evening. Now that the sluice-gate was down and the water had ceased temporarily to flow over it, the work went faster. Orde, watching with the eye of an expert, vouchsafed to the taciturn Newmark that he thought they'd make it.
Near midnight, however, a swaying lantern was seen approaching. Orde, leaping to his feet with a curse at the boy on watch, heard the sound of wheels. A moment later, Daly's bulky form stepped into the illumination of the fire.
Orde wandered over to where his principal stood peering about him.
“Hullo!” said he.
“Oh, there you are!” cried Daly angrily. “What in hell you up to here?”
“Running logs,” replied Orde coolly.
“Running logs!” shouted Daly, tugging at his overcoat pocket, and finally producing a much-folded newspaper. “How about this?”
Orde unfolded the paper and lowered it to the campfire. It was an extra, screaming with wood type. He read it deliberately over.
WAR!
the headline ran.
RIOTING AND BLOODSHED IN THE WOODS RIVERMEN AND DAM OWNERS CLASH!
There followed a vague and highly coloured statement to the effect that an initial skirmish had left the field in possession of the rivermen, in spite of the sheriff and a large posse, but that troops were being rushed to the spot, and that this “high-handed defiance of authority” would undoubtedly soon be suppressed. It concluded truthfully with the statement that the loss of life was as yet unknown.
Orde folded up the paper and handed it back.
“Don't you know any better than to get into that kind of a row down here?” Daly had been saying. “Do you want to bring us up for good here? Don't you realise that this isn't the northern peninsula? What are you trying to do, any way?”
“Sure I do,” replied Orde placidly. “Come along here till I show you the situation.”
Ten minutes later, Daly, relieved in his mind, was standing by the fire drinking hot coffee and laughing at Orde's description of Reed's plug hat.
To Orde's satisfaction, the sheriff did not reappear. Reed evidently now pinned his faith to the State troops.
All night the work went on, the men spelling each other at intervals of every few hours. By three o'clock the main abutments had been removed. The gate was then blocked to prevent its fall when its nether support should be withdrawn, and two men, leaning over cautiously, began at arm's-length to deliver their axe-strokes against the middle of the sill-timbers of the sluice itself, notching each heavy beam deeply that the force of the current might finally break it in two. The night was very dark, and very still. Even the night creatures had fallen into the quietude that precedes the first morning hours. The muffled, spaced blows of the axes, the low-voiced comments or directions of the workers, the crackle of the fire ashore were thrown by contrast into an undue importance. Men in blankets, awaiting their turn, slept close to the blaze.
Suddenly the vast silence of before dawn was broken by a loud and exultant yell from one of the axemen. At once the two scrambled to the top of the dam. The blanketed figures about the fire sprang to life. A brief instant later the snapping of wood fibres began like the rapid explosions of infantry fire; a crash and bang of timbers smote the air; and then the river, exultant, roaring with joy, rushed from its pent quietude into the new passage opened for it. At the same moment, as though at the signal, a single bird, premonitor of the yet distant day, lifted up his voice, clearly audible above the tumult.
Orde stormed into the camp up stream, his eyes bright, his big voice booming exultantly.
“Roll out, you river-hogs!” he shouted to those who had worked out their shifts earlier in the night. “Roll out, you web-footed sons of guns, and hear the little birds sing praise!”
Newmark, who had sat up the night through, and now shivered sleepily by the fire, began to hunt around for the bed-roll he had, earlier in the evening, dumped down somewhere in camp.
“I suppose that's all,” said he. “Just a case of run logs now. I'll turn in for a little.”
But Orde, a thick slice of bread half-way to his lips, had frozen in an attitude of attentive listening.
“Hark!” said he.
Faint, still in the depths of the forest, the wandering morning breeze bore to their ears a sound whose difference from the louder noises nearer at hand alone rendered it audible.
“The troops!” exclaimed Orde.
He seized a lantern and returned down the trail, followed eagerly by Newmark and every man in camp.
“Troops coming!” said Orde to Daly.
The men drew a little to one side, watching the dim line of the forest, dark against the paling sky. Shadows seemed to stir in its blackness. They heard quite distinctly the clink of metal against metal. A man rode out of the shadow and reined up by the fire. “Halt!” commanded a harsh voice. The rivermen could make out the troops—three or four score of them—standing rigid at attention. Reed, afoot now in favour of the commanding officer, pushed forward.
“Who is in charge here?” inquired the officer crisply.
“I am,” replied Orde, stepping forward.
“I wish to inquire, sir, if you have gone mad to counsel your men to resist civil authority?”
“I have not resisted civil authority,” replied Orde respectfully.
“It has been otherwise reported.”
“The reports have been false. The sheriff of this county has arrested about twenty of my men single-handed and without the slightest trouble.”
“Mr. Morris,” cried the officer sharply.
“Yes?” replied the sheriff.
“Is what this man says true?”
“It sure is. Never had so little fuss arrestin' rivermen before in my life.”
The officer's face turned a slow brick-red. For a moment he said nothing, then exploded with the utmost violence.
“Then why the devil am I dragged up here with my men in the night?” he cried. “Who's responsible for this insanity, anyway? Don't you know,” he roared at Reed, who that moment swung within his range of vision, “that I have no standing in the presence of civil law? What do you mean getting me up here to your miserable little backwoods squabbles?”
Reed started to say something, but was immediately cut short by the irate captain.
“I've nothing to do with that; settle it in court. And what's more, you'll have something yourself to settle with the State! About, face! Forward, march!”
The men faded into the gray light as though dissolved by it.
A deep and respectful silence fell upon the men, which was broken by Orde's solemn and dramatic declamation.
“The