Then the logs which had raced in the rapids came to the upper reaches of the slow deadwater of the flowage of the Skulltree dam; the flowage reached far back that year.
At Skulltree was the crux of the situation, as Flagg had insisted, ragefully.
From the early days there had been a dam at that point; it was common property and conserved the water to be loosed to drive logs over the shallow rapids below.
The Three C’s had spent more money on that dam, claiming that bigger drives needed extra water. The dam had been raised. The flowage vastly increased the extent of the deadwater, slowing the logs of the independents, whose towage methods were crude. The changes which had been made needed the sanction of impending legislation, required the authority of a charter for which application had been made. In the meantime the Three C’s were holding the water and would be impounding logs; these logs were to be diverted through the new, artificial canal.
In asserting their rights the corporation folks were endangering the independent drives which were destined for the sawmills of the Noda.
Day by day, as the drive went on, the girl listened to the talk among her men until she understood, in some measure, the situation. All the reckless haste was made of no account unless their logs were to be permitted to pass the Skulltree dam.
Vittum explained to her that the law was still considering the question of “natural flowage.” The dam had been changed from time to time in past years until the matter was in doubt.
“But the way the thing stands now there ain’t much of that nat’ral flowage,” he told her. “I claim that we have the right to go through, law or no law. Word was served early on Latisan that he must hold up at Skulltree this year and wait for the law.”
“Did he say what he proposed to do?” she asked.
“Yes, miss! I’ll have to be excused from repeating what he said, in the way he said it, but the gist of it was that he was going through. He said he would use some kind of flowage, and hoped that when the lawyers got done talking in court it would be decided that the aforesaid nat’ral flowage was the kind that had been used by him.”