“Yes, I want to see Joe. I’ve got something to say to him.”
Avery looked at her for a moment, scratched his elbow, and mumbled, “M-m-um, ya-a-s, pussibly you have.”
He was toying carelessly with a bundle of dynamite sticks. He would unwrap one, punch a hole in it with his knife, insert a fuse, and wrap up the soapy-looking stuff again. He attached one stick to another until he had a very impressive-looking giant firecracker. This he tied to a long maple sapling, round which he wound the loose end of the black fuse. Swickey appreciated her father’s society, but not enough to tarry with him just then. Their ideas regarding Providence were dissimilar in a great many details.
Avery liked to tease her. “If you ain’t in a hurry to see Joe, you kin carry one of these here fireworks down to the jam fur me. I’ll take this one. You kin take the one you’re settin’ on.”
She heard her father guffawing as she walked away. Suddenly he choked and spluttered. “Swallowed his tobacco, and I’m glad of it.” With this unfilial expression she hurried toward the river.
The jam lay in an angle of the gorge like a heap of titanic jackstraws. Behind it the water was backing up and widening. Every few minutes the upper edge would start forward, crowding the mass ahead. The river, meeting stubborn resistance, would lift a fringe of logs up on the slant of the jam and then the whole fabric would settle down with a grinding heave and a groan. Once in a while a single log would shoot into the air and fall back with a thump. Up on the edges of the gorge the birches were twinkling in the sun, and vivid, quick pine warblers were flitting about. Below was chaos, and groups of little men—pygmies—tugged and strained at their peaveys, striving to rearrange things as they thought they should be. The choked river growled and vomited spurts of yellow water from the face of the jam. Gray-shirted men leaped from log to log, gained the centre beneath that tangled, sagging wall of destruction, and labored with a superb unconsciousness of the all-too-evident danger. Some one shouted. The pygmies sprang away from the centre, each in a different direction like young quail running for cover. The mountain of timbers moved a few feet, settled, and locked again. Harrigan looked worried.
“Did you meet your Dad comin’ down?” he asked Swickey, who sat perched on a ledge overlooking the river.
“Yes. He asked me to help him carry his ‘fireworks’.”
“Here, Bill!” shouted Harrigan, “you go up and help Hoss. You know where he is.”
Meanwhile the men loafed round in little groups, joking and laughing, apparently unconscious of having done anything unusual. Their quarrel with the river was one of long-standing and regular recurrence. They were used to it. They leaned on their peaveys or squatted on the rocks, watching the river nonchalantly. Hardened by habit to any acute sense of danger, and keyed to a pitch of daring by pride in their physical ability, they more than defied destruction,—they ignored it. Yet each riverman knew when he stepped out on the logs beneath the face of the jam that the next moment might be his last. Undiluted courage raced in their veins and shone in their steady eyes.