She smiled back at him, but her lips quivered, “Of course it will pull next time; it can’t help it.”
“Of course not,” he agreed, being quite convinced to the contrary.
They fell silent, gloomily watching the crew at work. Below them a man clamped his peavey into a log at the base of the pile and swung back on it so that the tough stock bent like a whip. Failing to move it he called a comrade. They pried and boosted, their clinging shirts bulging with the swell of their back-muscles. Suddenly the log came away. Immediately a groan rose from the timbers. The men sprang to alertness. Crackings and complainings ran through the mass.
The girl caught Joe’s arm.
“It’s going out, Joe! It’s going out! Oh, see it pull!”
There was no doubt of it. The jam “pulled” with the bellow of a maddened beast. Logs shot outward, upward, downward—every way, rolling over and over, smashing, up-ending, grinding. Through them the white, torn water boiled madly. The core of the jam seemed to leap bodily downstream and then split into fragments.
Over the turmoil the rivermen fled for shore, each man balancing himself with his peavey, held low across his body. Their flight was swift, but unhurried and calculated. In face of the deadliest peril of the riverman—the breaking jam—they were cool and wary, timing to a nicety leap from tossing log to tossing log.
Suddenly, opposite the watchers, a man lost his footing and pitched forward. Another, twenty feet away, cleared the space with two leaps, caught the first by the collar and dragged him upright, but the man sagged down, evidently badly hurt. The other dropped his peavey, heaved him up in his arms and, thus burdened, made for shore. He sprang once, twice, hampered by his load. Then a wave of smashing timber surged down and over them. They were blotted from the world, effaced without even a stain on the torn water.
Jack, deadly white, with shining eyes and parted lips, stared at the spot where they had been.
“Oh, the brave boy—the poor, brave boy!” she cried. “Who was he, Joe?”