“Same way we used to duck them out of the sorting boom,” Murphy explained. “Isn’t that a slick trick, though?”
It seemed little short of marvelous to Scott, who had never acquired the knack of running logs, but he could not stop to enthuse over it now. The next thing to find out was what they did with them in the swamp.
They got a bateau from the camp and paddled around to the place in the swamp where the log was floating. “Right out beyond here somewhere,” Scott cried, “ought to be that chain which we are supposed to have stumbled over.”
They paddled slowly on into the swamp, scanning every tree eagerly. They had not covered more than two hundred yards when Murphy finished the sentence which Scott had begun. “And there she is.”
They paddled swiftly over to the furrowed and swollen butt of an old cypress. Hanging from a spike about a foot and a half above the water was a heavy logging chain. “So you are the guilty party,” Scott exclaimed, as he looked curiously at the chain. “The next question is, What did they do with you?”
Murphy grabbed the chain and began to pull on it. There was no give at first. Then something on the end of it which seemed to be somewhere under the spreading roots of the tree began to swing slowly to one side.
“Feels like an alligator from the way it is swinging around in there,” Murphy exclaimed, as he redoubled his efforts on the chain. Before he could make any further remarks the thing suddenly shot out from under the tree and almost dumped them out of the bateau. It was a heavy, tublike boat which had been caught on one of the roots of the tree, and in it were all the tools and materials needed to build a section of a log raft.
“So that is the way they worked it,” Scott exclaimed. “Now I see the whole thing. They shot their logs out of the pond there at night the way you did a few minutes ago. Then the next day they collected them over here and made them up into rafts. Then when they started for the mill with a log raft they hauled one of these sections, or maybe sometimes two or three of them, out of one of those lower openings in the river bank and hooked it on to their raft. No one would be likely to notice just how many sections they had. Then when they came to their canal down below there they took that section off and no one was any the wiser. Well, it was pretty slick and it worked.”
“And now I think I’ll go back to camp. I did not know how tired I was till now, that it is all over and cleared up, I feel like going to sleep here in the bottom of this boat.”
“Come on over to my place,” Murphy said, “and I’ll lend you a horse.”