The Sophie Green, a beamy, shallow-draft, paddle-wheeled old teakettle, lay broad-side-on to a rickety wharf which was piled with cord wood. From the pile, across her gang-plank and back again, trotted an endless procession of deckhands and rivermen, carrying the big sticks that were her fuel. The fires were roaring beneath her boilers, and the gauge was beginning to move.
A hundred yards away, at another cord wood pile, her sister craft, the Ada Bell, was receiving like attentions. Out in the darkness, by the fitful light of lanterns, half a dozen big riverboats crowded with men, were shackling up short lengths of boom into longer ones. Chains rattled and hammers rang on cold-shuts as the crews joined the timbers. Down the shore for a mile and more other rivermen hunted for boats, taking everything that would pull two pairs of oars.
When she had steam enough the Sophie Green bellowed and cast off, wallowing around in a short semi-circle. A peakie shot under her stern and a heaving-line uncoiled across her deck. To this was attached a hawser. It came inboard to the bucking clatter of a winch, and was made fast to the towing bitts. Then the crew of the peakie swarmed aboard; the peakie was hoisted up with half a dozen others, and the Sophie felt her way downstream in the darkness, a half-mile of boom trailing after her. In twenty minutes the Ada Bell followed with more boom-timbers in tow.
The river just below the rapids was obstructed by the floating logs of the broken drive, and the Sophie went through them gingerly, fearful for her paddle-wheels. It was still pitch-dark and blowing hard, but the rain had ceased. The lake opened out before them, scummed with foam and torn into choppy, white-topped waves among which the logs were tossing.
Joe and McKenna were in the wheel-house with Capt. Jimmy Congdon, a veteran of the river who had been a warm friend of William Kent’s, and was ready to do anything for his son. Captain Jimmy was broad, ruddy, and silver-haired, with a pair of steady blue eyes that never shifted. Periodically he spat to leeward with precision, but until the lake opened up his whole attention was devoted to the wheel.
“Steerin’ on a night like this is mostly be-guess and be-god,” he vouchsafed. “There’s Six Mile Light off to sta’bo’rd. Now, young man, I run this boat to suit you, so tell me what you want.”
“I want to boom the logs the easiest and quickest way,” Joe informed him. “How would you do it?”
Captain Jimmy spat and reflected. “Blowin’ like she is now logs’d jump a boom even if we got ’em into one; but she’s breezin’ too hard to last. If it was me, come daylight I’d boom off the Fire Island Channel and sweep the floatin’ stuff into it.”
This advice was identical with McKenna’s. Joe decided to adopt it. Daylight found them lying to, below long, swampy Fire Island, which lay well over toward the eastern shore. They strung a boom from the lower end to the mainland, thus closing the channel and forming a great pocket; and then they went at the tough job of “sweeping up” the scattered drive.
The logs were strewn all over the upper end of the lake; but by that strange attraction which floating objects have for one another many of them lay in small rafts. They lay inert, motionless on the almost glassy expanse, for the storm had blown itself out and a sunny day of almost perfect calm succeeded. When these floating patches of timber were reached the peakies were dumped over the side and the rivermen tumbled into them.